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THE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREAT THINKERS

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

ARCHITECTS OP IDEAS

THE STORY OF THE

World’s Great
Thinkers

BY ERNEST R. TRATTNER

The New Home Library, 14 West Forty-ninth Street
New York, N, Y.

PEINTEI?, IN THR-l?NITE3> STATES OF AMERICA

To My Brother
Dr. Harry R. Trattner

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I desire to express to Henry W. Alexander my
appreciation for the work he contributed in con-
nection with the chapters of this book dealing with
Darwin, Dalton, Copernicus, Marx, Pasteur and
Freud; for his general aid and counsel and his
unflagging interest in connection with both the
elaboration of the original conception and its
execution.

CONTENTS

Introduction . . . about theories 3

1. COPERNICUS ... THEORY OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM 11

2. HUTTON . . . THEORY OF THE STRUCTURE OF THE EARTH 46

3. DALTON . . . THEORY OF THE STRUCTURE OF MATTER 72

4. LAVOISIER . . . THEORY OF FIRE ^

5 . RUMFORD . , . THEORY OF HEAT 121

6 . HUYGENS . . . theory of light i44

7. MALTHUS . . . theory of population 163

8 . SCHWANN . . . THEORY of the cell 189

9. DARWIN . . . THEORY OF evolution 211

10. MARX . . . THEORY of the economic interpretation

of history 241

11. PASTEUR . . . THEORY OF disease 272

12. FREUD . . . THEORY OF THE MIND 302

13. CHAMBERLIN . . . theory of the origin of our

‘ ' .I.:,.!....;...,, . ~ .

THE GREAT THEORIES OF MANKIND

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Introduction • . . . about theories

A CERTAIN cynic who once compared man to a bird said that the
human being starts from nowhere and arrives at nowhere— “however,
his flight is superb.”

Something of the grandeur of man’s ascent is to be found in his
speculations; when superb they constitute a vast sweep over wide
ranges of fact leading humanity toward a better and more compre-
hensive view of its relation to the universe.

Perhaps no one will ever write a complete story of all the theories
—scientific, economic, philosophical— that have been conceived in
different ages by widely separated thinkers. Such a task would cover
long stretches of history, taking us over territories of sadly useless
investigations, into jungles of things now meaningless. Yet it would
seem that theories are about the most interesting phenomena of
man’s mind. For a theory is a portrait of a vast idea seen and de-
lineated. Its ability to synthesize and explain a group of facts, facts
which as they stand are incomplete, lea^ us out of glistening bays
into vast oceans of enthralling truth.

Whether he knows it or not, every person has been born into a
universe and is a part of a vast cosmic system; but only a few in all
the ages have understood or remotely apprehended its significance.
Unfortunately, the popular idea of universal theories as vague and
altogether lacking in the element of vitality has obscured the human
drama in these magnificent obsessions. Obviously, this mistaken
notion is due to the fact that a theory has too often been thought to
be devoid of earthly concern, aloof and unconnected with practical
affairs. Actually, this is far from the case, as these chapters demon-
strate. Moreover, those who wish to share in the heritage of hard
thinking and intense imagination will find in the lives of the great
theorists a unique company of mortals— men of incredible persever-
ance, the makers and the shakers of our modem world.

The individual human battle in the,“conquest-march” of progress

4 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

is so fundamental that no attempt to understand a theory apart from
the life of the theorist could possibly be considered sound. All sci-
ence, said Rend Descartes, rests upon man, upon the one indubitable
certainty that “I think and therefore I am.” In this view Descartes
presented a profound understanding of the essence of thought. To
Francis Bacon the root of science was a natural fact. Descartes’ in-
sistence went one step beyond; he saw that before natural fact can
be of use to the scientist he must observe it. And the fact of his ob-
serving it is truly the fact that matters most. For this reason it is one
thing to know a theory and quite another thing to know the same
theory in its historical setting and especially in terms of the theorist
whose genius gave it birth. If we aspire to be honest we cannot dis-
regard the influence of the man on his thought— and also, to be sure,
the theory on the man: it is a reciprocal relationship. “Man is only
half himself, the other half is his expression.”

Essentially every theorist is an iconoclast; he is an iconoclast be-
cause he is an emancipator. Few men want truth— by far the vast
majority prefer their bondage. Yet the history of the freedom of
human thought is everywhere strewn with the vast wreckage of
theories which at one time were dear to the hearts of those who be-
lieved them.

The Ptolemaic system of astronomy was based upon a theory
which was accepted as long as it worked. It accorded fully with the
facts which the ancients could observe and interpret. For many cen-
turies both the theory and the system had been of service to astron-
omers, to navigators, and to the makers of calendars. Then, in the
course of history, there came with awakening awareness a new age
when the Ptolemaic system broke down hopelessly. Not even the
comforts of ancient authority could save it. In its place men had to
build another theory more in accord with the facts. That was indeed
a painful process as we know only too well from the records which
have come down to us.

With the arrival of the Copernican theory a new floor had been
added to tlie structure of knowledge. But only a small minority were
able to change their thinking to meet this newer level. Most people,
then as now, cherish their convictions and are adroit in avoiding
evidence contrary to what they wish to believe. They are mightily
akin to the old theologian who said that he was entirely open to

ABOUT THEORIES

conviction, but would like to see anybody who could convince him.
No discoveries could be made that would modify his views. He was
safe in the “possession” of the truth.

In every age previous to our own there ivas supposed to exist a
body of knowledge final and infallible. Frequently people thought
of this knowledge as having been revealed directly from heaven.
Embodied in rigid tradition and held sacred by all authorities, it
was considered heresy to question any time-honored belief. All that
men wished to knoiv w'as assumed to have been already given. There
was no need for anybody to inquire into the vital issues of the cos-
mos. The story of the theorists, however, is the story of a thin and
irregular line of searchers after truth, men who battled almost alone
on the vast frontiers of knowledge, for they had no “revealed Provi-
dence” to fall back on. Precisely that which was accepted by their
contemporaries, that which was taught and delivered, had to be
discarded. “It is the function of genius,” Emerson once remarked,

“to indicate to lesser minds the paths they must pursue.”

In many ways mankind’s intellectual progress reminds one of
Edmond Rostand’s chanticleer. The rooster crows, and morning
appears; consequently his life is built around the idea that a causal
relation exists between his crowing and the appearance of dawn.
Chanticleer is very sure of this until his enemies plot to silence him.
One day the dawn appears without Chanticleer’s crowing summons.
Thoroughly dejected, the sorrowful cock realizes his mistake. He
searches immediately for a new hypothesis!

E\’’ery now and then the whole world is first shocked, then con-
vinced and afterrvards revolutionized by some majestic outcome of
human thought. Take the case of Copernicus. It was indeed a horri-
fying suggestion that he put forth: that this round earth is not only
whirling on its axis, but is actually swinging in a vast orbit about the
sun. People quoted Scripture to refute such heresy. Does not the
Ninety-third Psalm declare, “The world is established that it can-
not be moved”? Contemptuously they asked: “Who will venture to
place the authority of Copernicus above that of Holy Scripture?”
Inherent in the pronomrcements of Copernicus was a supreme revo- ,
lution in thought. It brought about a tremendous intellectual awak- *
ening, for he wrote a new story of the heavens in lieu of the aban-
doned one. The disaepancy between the star-record observed b^ ;

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Copernicus and the Book-record quoted by the people caused much
rubbing of eyes. Out of this rubbing has come a glorious vision of
the new heavens.

As a matter of fact, when the Ptolemaic system of astronomy
passed away, the heavens remained just as they had always been.
The stars did not swerve from tlieir course because Ptolemy was dis-
credited. The sun and the moon and the stars were each in their
accustomed place. Nothing was disturbed except the Ptolemaic sys-
tem of astronomy. And that was gone forever.

Every period of history, however “static” it may appear to be, is
characterized by some change in its intellectual climate. We con-
stantly witness not a mere shifting of the clouds but a profound
transformation of thought. Of the great theories that now hold the
attention of mankind there have been many foreshadowings. Not a
few of the most important contemporary ideas have been held
vaguely, tentatively, and in a dreamy way hinted by thinkers in
other ages. The debt to the past is very great indeed. When a truth
is extended or deepened by further insight or brought into a new
logical connection with other truths, it becomes part of an impos-
ing new edifice. The revolutionary conception of Copernicus had
been anticipated centuries before by Aristarchus of Samos. The
fact that this old Greek scientist held this opinion gave Copernicus
courage to revive it. Thus, seemingly, new ideas and discoveries are
often old ideas revived and rejuvenated.

Each age has its theorists who restate the knowledge accumulated
in newer fields and seek to harmonize it w’ith the old which remain
undisputed. Darwin once remarked about the stimulating effect of
mistaken theories as compared with the sterilizing effect of mistaken
observations: mistaken observations lead men astray, mistaken the-
ories suggest true theories.

Ultimate truth is never attained in any one generation by any one
man. Truth grows by small accretions and is relative to the age in
which it appears. It is undeniably true that in their day the theorists
of antiquity led people to a new and better understanding of life.
Theories— even the mistaken ones— are gigantic generalizations which
have revolutionized human thought and conduct; they have affected
the life of humanity and its fun^mental relations to the universe.

It is truly to be m^el^ at how much of the theoretical work of

ABOUT THEORIES

the world has been done in quietness and confidence. Great results
seem never to be hurried. Apparently progress comes in brief periods
of insight when the theorist, gifted with a new vision, projects it
out into the world where it sheds fresh light. The men in this field
who have achieved most gloriously have been nobly alone. Their
number has never been large. Among the billions of human beings
who have inhabited the earth only a very small number has pos-
sessed the faculty of discovering the hidden relations existing be-
tween certain phenomena. In the entire history of mankind there
have not been more than two dozen first-rate theorists, men endowed
with the intuition of unknown things and the imagination that cre-
ates new worlds. Perhaps there is no achievement that demands
such exceptional mental power, physiological endurance and im-
mense intellectual effort as the ability to formulate a scientific the-
ory.

An honest theory must be in all essentials a true view. It should
give us a picture of something which lies behind the things not im-
mediately accessible to experience; it must enable us to understand
why things behave as they actually do. The mental process of making
suppositions is as old as the race itself. Men have always entertained
concepts or mental pictures in the hope that one alternative or the
other will turn out to be true. Consequently we have many impos-
ing but unreal systems of thought— vast balloons floating unattached
through the thin air of pure fantasy.

Often what has passed for a theory has been nothing more than
a baseless hypothesis. Much that has been paraded with a pretense
at wisdom has proven to be singularly sterile, a masquerade of con-
fused terminology and incomprehensible absurdities. It is a strange
irony that men in their efforts to be logical and reasonable have so
frequently spoken nonsense and written idiocies. Only an unusual
mind can resist the temptation of pseudoclarity. True intellectual
enterprise does not consist simply in listing mere data; the theorist
does more than elucidate the obvious. The additional task required
is to make the facts yield more information about themselves; for
nature is more than she obviously is.

The genuine theorist helps us to see that the world is more than
we had supposed it to be. This is because his theory possesses archi-
techtonic qualities. A connection or; coherence exists in which one

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

part supports the other. It is not like a balloon but a tower; its top
may be in the stratosphere, but it has been raised from foundations

For this reason a theory cannot be a tissue of self-contained hy-
potheses. Just to sit down and suppose something and then work
out the consequences may be an exercise in imagination, but that is
not science. A theory as such refers beyond itself and is relative to
something which is real and not hypothetical. Facts must suggest
the theory.

Sometimes the word theory is used as synonymous with hypothesis.
Here it is taken to indicate a generalized explanation that has al-
ready passed beyond the stage of mere hypothesis. An hypothesis
is a theory in the making. In dealing with an hypothesis one is
aware of its partial explanation, its deficiencies— the need for further
attempts to supplement it by additional concepts. Only when it has
received a considerable amount of verification does it pass on to the
august status of a theory.

To trace the growth of a theory is a fascinating adventure. In its
embryonic stages it is made up of one or more hypotheses. The
hypothesis is framed on the basis of a rather small set of facts. As
additional knowledge and insight come pouring in, it is then ex-
panded. Only as it achieves scope and adequacy does it grow into
theory. Basically, a theory interprets a greater range of fact than a
hypothesis. When the theory becomes so comprehensive that its
scope is world-wide, then the very range and sweep of its explana-
tion gives it that rare quality known as universality.

“Theorist” has long been a term of opprobrium. It was the with-
ering epithet hurled at Hutton, Darwin, Freud and others. But so
great has been the cumulative impact of the work of these men upon
our civilization, so thoroughly have their courageous generalizations
forced humanity to discard its age-old illusions and “opinions,”
that the prestige of the theorizing scientist in our day has reached
unbelievable heights. Carlyle, it is said, sat listening once to the
common talk about the ineffectiveness of ideas; then, when a pause
came, remarked, “Gentlemen, there was once a man called Rou-s-
seau. He wrote a book which was nothing but ideas. People laughed
at it. But the skins of those who laughed went to bind the second
?; edition of the book.'*

ABOUT THEORIES

The public acclaim of Albert Einstein— theorist par excellence—
is one of the significant facts of modern times. Without understand-
ing much about relativity the man on the street feels that Einstein
is a symbol: that far beyond the phenomena which have been
brought within the range of our senses, others still await to be re-
vealed, that tomorrow there may well arise more potent or refined
means of observation, or newer methods of investigation.

In this book fifteen theorists have been chosen because they have
one thing in common: an impressive contemporary implication.
In each case the theory is a self portrait of the man worthy to hang
in any scientific gallery. Their personalities match the greatness of
their achievements. They are men from widely separated ages, pos-
sessed of different dispositions, beset with the most diverse circum-
stances, yet they are made strangely akin by the selfless search after
truth. Basically, these fifteen thoughts are differing aspects of one
gigantic whole.

The arrangement of these chapters is a chronological one. “The
grandest of all musics,” says an old Gaelic proverb, “is the music
of the thing that happens.” When the heroes were asked which of
all the musics of nature they preferred, the music of the waterfall,
the cry of the eagle, the belling of a stag, the baying of hounds— the
list is too long to repeat— they would invariably answer, “Give us
the music of the thing that happens.”

Wliat is important to us is that these theories are essential to a
world-view which now embraces all the cardinal concerns of man.
They carry us back and forth between a vast world of inconceivable
magnitude and an equally vast sub-world of inconceivable smallness.
Yet the linkage between them is very intimate. Just as it takes many
different rays of light to make sunshine, so it takes many different
sciences to give us a view of the wbole as a whole.

1. Copernicus . . .

THEORY OF THE
SOLAR SYSTEM

THE story of the gi'eat theories of mankind takes us back to a period
of ancient history when Christianity was a little more than one hun-
dred years old. In those far-off days there lived in the city of Alex-
andria in Egypt an astronomer by the name of Claudius Ptolemy.
From the little we know about him he must have been an extremely
interesting person for he not only studied the stars, but was a
geographer as well. The exact dates of his life are doubtful; how-
ever, we do know that he was born in Alexandria and that his re-
corded observations extended to the year 151 a.d.

Among the many unique and interesting cities of antiquity
Alexandria was perhaps pre-eminent. Although located in Egypt at
the mouth of the Nile, it was essentially a Greek community, despite
the large numbers of different peoples who swarmed within its
ghettos and suburbs. At the time when Ptolemy was studying the
stars and writing his books, the city of Alexandria was already the
enlightened capital of the world; both its university and its library
were known from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. Even
in Asia, and in remote parts of Africa too, people had come to know
that science and education, philosophy, music, art and literature
flourished there as in no other place. For this reason Alexandria had
for centuries attracted large numbers of scholars. They flocked from
everywhere just to breathe the cosmopolitan atmosphere of its
schools.

It is surprising how many names of illustrious Alexandrian
scholars have come down to us over the centuries— Philo, Eratos-
thenes, Euclid, Strabo, Aristarchus, Hipparchus and a score of lesser
lights. Some were original thinkers, men of wide-ranging interests
and outstanding ability; some were little more than industrious col-
lators of facts who managed to assemble the researches of their
fellow men and preserve them for future generations. .

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

rtolemy s book, as we have seen, is virtually an expansion of the
views of his predecessors/notably Hipparchus. It contains a true por-
trait of how the ancients, to the very best of their ability, tried to
picture the universe. Owing to the celebrity of the author the ideas
expounded in The Almagest c&iae to be known as the Ptolemaic
theo^. According to this theory the earth is the fixed center of the

Claudius Ptolemy was not so much a creative and original thinker
as he was a collator. Men like Hipparchus were the real originators
of new astronomical methods; Ptolemy was the perfector of their
ideas and the systematizer of their knowledge. He did not hesitate
to appropriate the works of his predecessors and use tliem as the
basis of his own. To accuse him of plagiarism on this account would
be, of course, quite absurd. All the great books of antiquity, whether
they be astronomical, religious or medical, are compilations. In
those ancient days men felt free to use the writings of the great
thinkers who had gone before them. In this way many of the treas-
ures of the antique world have been preserved.

One of the most tragic calamities in the history of human thought
was the destruction of the great library at Alexandria. Thousands of
rare books that once graced its shelves perished over night and have
since been lost to the world. Fortunately, very fortunately, a few
were preserved, among them that remarkable synthesis and com-
pendium of ancient astronomical knowledge known to the world as
The Almagest of Claudius Ptolemy. Translated into several lan-
guages, including the Arabic, this wwk found its way by the most
curious channels into the schools of Europe and Asia.

Within a remarkably short space of time it became the unques-
tioned and authoritative textbook on astronomy. The same age
that came to look upon the Bible as of divine origin came also to
look upon the information contained in The Almagest as defending
the doctrines of Scripture. Although Ptolemy had not the remotest
idea of supporting the Bible, his writings were nevertheless seized
upon as both evidence and confirmation. So great was the halo of
sanctity thrown around Ptolemy that to question him was to ques-
tion the Holy Bible itself.

But what heresy is greater than the heresy of a pointed question?

COPERNICUS 13

universe: the sun and the moon, the stars and the planets merely
revolve about it in twenty-four hours.

Fundamentally the Ptolemaic system is the conception of the
world which any child would form for himself from his own limited
and superficial knowledge. He sees the sun rise each morning in
the east, pass across the sky, and sink again in the west. He naturally
assumes that the sun moves around the earth. He does not conceive
of the earth moving, because he does not see it move. And this was
precisely the reaction of the children of history, the Greeks, the
Romans, and the early medieval Europeans. Of course, there were
here and there a few isolated thinkers who speculated on the possi-
bility that the earth and all the planets revolved around the sun, but
they left no impression whatsoever on the popular and accepted
notions of the day.

The child, let us say, grows older, and acquires a more than in-
fantile interest in the heavens: each night he watches the movement
of individual stars and sees how they shift their positions. He has
already made his fundamental premise, that the earth is immovable
and the center of the universe. He now seeks to reconcile with this
premise these new movements of the stars which' he has observed.
Consequently he assumes that the movement of the stars in the sky
is a stellar movement about the earth as a fixed center.

Next, he notices that there are some stars that move differently
and faster than the others. While the great mass of stars appears to
perform a regular unvarying movement about the earth, these others
sometimes move faster, sometimes slower, sometimes not at all. Nor
do they keep in straight paths, but wander about the sky in ap-
parently aimless courses.

The Greeks noticed this wandering movement of certain stars
They gave to them the name of planetoi, or planets, which simply
means wanderers, nomads, celestial vagabonds. And crude thou^
their astronomical technique was, they were able to calculate that
these planets were much nearer to the earth than the fixed stars.

But they still had their fundamental assumption on their hands,
namely: that the earth does not move. All these bodies— planets,
fixed stars, sun and moon— they thought revolved about the earth in
circular movement. But try as they would they could hot reconcile
the crazy movements of the planets with a perfect drde (for it waSi .

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

their underlying conviction that a circle represented the perfection
of the universe). So it came to pass that as further calculations of
planetary distances and directions were made, and as observations
detected more and more minor apparent motions of the planets, fur-
ther corrections had to be added, which were incompatible with the
Ptolemaic doctrine in its simplicity. The exponents embroidered the
one great circle with an ever-increasing number of cycles and epi-
cycles, till confusion became worse confounded.

What was the main error of the epicycle-makers? They tried to
patch an ancient fiction instead of asking themselves whether, after
all, its basis was laid in truth. They tinkered instead of re-creating.
“Sir, had I been present at creation, I could have rendered pro-
found advice,” remarked King Alphonse X of Castile to his astron-
omy teacher. That happened one day in the middle of the thir-
teenth century.

Alphonse’s remark was not the flippant statement of a monarch
thumbing his nose at the heavens; it was the intelligent reaction
of an untrammeled mind to the hodgepodge of complicated non-
sense that medieval astronomy had grown to be. By the thirteenth
century so many epicycles and “eccentrics” had been added to
Ptolemy’s Almagest, that Alphonse’s blasphemy was nothing more
than a sensible man’s outcry against absurdity.

But Alphonse had to accept his Ptolemy in the end, for the the-
orizing man, who was to put astronomy’s house in ordei', had not
yet appeared. The king’s zeal for astronomy, notwithstanding the
fact that he was chilled by the spectacle of Ptolemy’s epicycles, was
sufficient to bring him to devote enormous sums of money to the
preparation of the Alphonsine Tables of heavenly motions, whicli
were grounded upon the Ptolemaic system and provided the best
working basis at that time for the computation of dates, the length
of the year, and the reform of the calendar.

, During the two hundred years after the time of Alphonse, the
medieval astronomers continued to accumulate observations; they
continued also to revise and make even more involved the system
; pf the heavens that had exasperated the king. But dissatisfaction
began to groyr. The coihing dawn of a more scientific age had to

COPERNICUS 15

await the investigator who would challenge the authority of
Ptolemy.

That investigator appeared in the person of Nicolaus Copernicus.

Whether Copernicus was a German or a Pole is of little impor-
tance to us, even if there were any solid ground on which to base
a decision. He was born on February 19, 1473, in the town of
Thorn, which a few years before had passed into the hands of the
Poles. But the region was undoubtedly German in character, and
Copernicus always referred (in German) to Prussia as “our dear
fatherland.” His family, however, were more Polish than German—
the family name was Koppernigk— and his father came from Cra-
cow, a Polish city.

Young Nicolaus was only ten years old when his father died, and
he became the ward of his uncle, Lucas Watzelrode, a Roman
Catholic priest, who became Bishop of Ermeland in 1489. At about
the same time it was determined that Nicolaus should study for
the Church.

It was an age of dim stirrings of enlightenment. The scholastic
pall of medievalism was beginning to be lifted. A new movement
called Humanism, inspired by a revival of interest in the things
of this world, had been sweeping through Italy. Its influence was
now stretching far to the north. In fact, tinges of Humanism were
evident in Nicolaus’ own home, on the shores of the Baltic, near
the very outskirts of civilization. These influences were largely re-
sponsible for his family’s decision to give him a broad cultural
foundation on which he might base his church studies. With Coper-
nicus’ matriculation at the University of Cracow, a twenty-six-year
period of higher study began that eventually was to ripen into the
first great theory of mankind.

Cracow at the time was the best university north of the Alps,
especially in point of scientific training. Bishop Watzelrode him-
self had studied there, and his Humanist leanings prompted him
to choose this university for his nephew. At the age of nineteen
Copernicus, his mind glowing with eagerness for knowledge, new
ideas, and the possibilities of thought, began his formal higher edm
cation.

l6 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Astronomy and mathematics, the twin sciences, claimed his at-
tention almost at the outset. The fame o£ Regiomontanus and
Purbach, the translators of Ptolemy’s Almagest, was still resound-
ing throughout Europe. In fact, the astronomical tables of Regio-
montanus had superseded the Alphonsine as the most reliable and
accurate up to that time. While at Cracow, Copernicus devoted
himself principally to mathematics. He did not fail to examine
with profound interest the astronomical instruments which the uni-
versity possessed. Crude as these instruments were, so were the
courses on orthodox astronomy. But there was nothing else avail-
able, and Copernicus had not yet come either to question or dis-
pute the ancient authorities.

Nevertheless, the seeds of new thought were planted and took
firm root in his soul. His favorite teacher, Albert Brudzewski, a
leader of the Humanists, into whose confidence the young and bril-
liant student soon made his way, was the storm center of a hot de-
bate between the reactionary scholastics and the progressive Hu-
manists. Copernicus made his choice early; he threw in his lot with
Brudzewski and the Humanists and never wavered from that de-
cision for the rest of his life.

However, in this first skirmish, Humanism was conquered, and
the victorious reactionaries made things so unpleasant for the cham-
pions of the new order that most of them decamped to seek out
more receptive schools. Brudzewski left Cracow, and most of the
other of Copernicus’ Humanist friends followed him. Life at Cra-
cow became extremely dull and unsatisfying. At the end of the
year the young student returned home for a period to persuade his
uncle to permit him to complete his education elsewhere— prefer-
ably in Italy.

He was now vastly more eager for knowledge; his first glimpse
of the boundless vistas of science had thrilled him. The flame of
investigation had been kindled. Unhesitatingly he chose his avoca-
tion— astronomy— with fierce determination to learn all that was
being taught about it. And more, if possible!

Part of his desire to study astronomy was a secret feeling that he
might bring order out of chaos. He had had enough of the subject
to have experienced a reaction similar to that of King Alphonse;
Copernicus was plainly appalled by the extraordinary chaos in

COPERNICUS

which his favorite science found itself. One thing particularly im-
pressed him (aside from the great mass of epicycles that cluttered
up the sky); this was the inability of mathematicians to reckon the
length of the regular year. Young Copernicus began to cast about
for a way to bring law into this chaotic situation. It was this
specific attempt which led him to consider the possibility that the
earth revolved about the sun— a view directly opposite to the ac-
cepted teachings of the Church. At first he merely played with this
idea; he had sufficient humility to wait before proposing anything
so utterly revolutionary.

The two years Copernicus spent in Thom after leaving Cracow
enabled his uncle to build for him a circle of acquaintances that
would be of use later on when he had finished studying and would
have to enter upon the practical affairs of life. The bishop lost no
time in looking about— a job for his nephew was necessary. While
there was some little opposition from those who resented the play-
ing of favorites in handing out church positions, Watzelrode was
finally successful, and in 1497 Copernicus was elected a canon of
the Cathedral at Frauenburg, in Ermeland, his uncle’s own diocese.

. 5

No sooner had he been appointed to the cathedral than he was
given a leave of absence to continue his education.

In Italy, he matriculated at the University of Bologna, and con-
tinued his feverish pursuit of mathematics, physics, and astronomy.
Here was much greater liberty of thought than was permitted in
the sterner northland. Copernicus attached himself as disciple and
friend to Domenicus Maria Novara, one of the best astronomers of
the age; too intelligent a man to submit to the literal and unequiv-
ocal acceptance of Ptolemaic notions. Too intelligent, that is, to
submit personally. He did not dare to dissent openly— consequently
his lectures before his students were full of guarded statements.
For a few privileged favorites, such as Copernicus, Novara gave his
arguments against Ptolemy.

Novara was a Pythagorean, and before we can discuss him, it is
necessary to go back two thousand years in history to that remark-
able galaxy of Greek mathematical philosophers who grouped them-
selves about Pythagoras of Samos, in the sixth century before Christ.

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

We shall view them through the eyes of the student Copernicus,
who at Bologna had made great progress in the study of the Greek
language and now began to read with avidity the works of Pythag-
oras and his followers.

First of all, Copernicus found in the Pythagoreans the source of
many of the doctrines still upheld by Ptolemaic astronomy. For
instance, they had developed the idea that the paths of planets and
stars must be circular, because the circle was the most perfect of
all figures and because it was also the most economical. Pythagoras
himself had been a believer in the spherical shape of the earth,
reasoning that it must be a sphere since all the other heavenly
bodies were spheres, and because of the evidence sailors gave of
seeing stars rise or fall in the sky as the ship moved north or south.

It must have been at this time that Copernicus read with more
than antiquarian interest of the case of the old Greek thinker
Anaxagoras, who, a century after Pythagoras, had been cast into an
Athenian jail for maintaining that the sun was not a heavenly
chariot daily driven by the gods through the skies. In those days
too, Copernicus learned, there were plenty of ignorant priests fear-
ful of new ideas, for the histories of Greece told him about Di-
opheites, an ecclesiastic who was sufficiently strong in Athenian
politics to have a law passed which demanded “the immediate
prosecution of all those who disbelieved in the established religion
or held theories of their own about certain divine things.” Under
this law Anaxagoras, one of the greatest minds of antiquity, ’was
made to suffer. Being a wise man, who could learn from history,
Copernicus believed that scientific caution w'as better than ecclesias-
tical inquisition. Not until he lay on his death bed, comfortably
beyond the powers of the Church, did he permit his manuscript
to be published to the world.

There were still other things that Copernicus learned from the
ancients.

In reading the old manuscripts he found some interesting ideas
in the work of Philalaus, another Pythagorean. Whereas Pythagoras,
with all his mathematical reasoning, had continued in the belief that !
the earth was the immovable center of the universe, Philalaus had ■
been the first to suppose that this might not be so. In Philalaus’
system, the earth with all the other planets actually moved; that

COPERNICUS

^19

is, they turned around a body called the central fire, which could
not be seen because all the known parts of the earth were turned
away from it.

The important thing to Copernicus was that this system, although
obviously full of misconceptions and unnecessary assumptions, had
been able to explain phenomena on the basis of a movable earth,
just as he himself thought might be possible. As he read more
widely in the Greeks, he encountered other examples— necessarily
isolated— of investigators who had assumed that the earth might
not be the center of the universe.*

There was, for example, Hicetas of Syracuse who maintained that
the earth, of all the heavenly bodies, was the only body that moved
and that this motion took place on its own axis. But Philalaus’
system had been, as were many of the Pythagorean speculations,
merely an hypothesis. It had received little credence and managed
to survive principally because of its novelty and because of the
value of the general mathematical principles it embodied. It lin-
gered on in the modifications several other workers made of it when
they discussed the possibility of the earth’s rotation on its axis,
placing the Central Fire at the interior of the earth, so that while
the earth was no longer immovable, it still remained at the center
of things.

Copernicus read also a good deal of Plato. He discovered, much
to his surprise, that Plato as a young man had been at first a
geocentrist— maintaining the conventional belief that the earth was
tlie center of all things— but later on had veered to the possibility
of the revolution of the earth around the sun. Plato never had
spoken out boldly about these newer ideas, but had merely hinted
at them now and again. (Apparently the philosopher was fright-
ened at the daring of his own thoughts.) However, these hints

* Aristarchus of Samos in the third century b.c. was the first philosopher to
suggest that the sun is the center and that the earth revolved round it in a
year. Copernicus mentioned Aristarchus in his manuscript as having held helio-
centric ideas, but in making his final revision struck out the passage as unim-
portant. As a matter of fact, although Aristarchus has been called the “Coper-
nicus of antiquity” and credited with having worked out Copernicus’ theory in
its entirety, it is doubtful whether it was . not with him as with many others
(Nicolas Cusanus, Martius Capella, Oresme of Lisieux) a rnerely transient ,
hypothesis. ,

ARGHITECTS OF IDEAS

were sufficient to strengthen Copernicus’ own rebellion against the
time-honored authorities.

Novara, as we have seen, was a Pythagorean. As such he insisted
upon the idea of harmony in the heavenly system and felt that the
crowd of epicycles that choked the Ptolemaic skies expressed no
such harmony. He played with the thought of axial rotation and
with the ideas of Philalaus and the others. As a result of all these
Greek notions, Novara’s study in Bologna was the scene of lively
discussions between the master and the future theorist. Working to-
gether, they measured the heavens from the observatory of the uni-
versity where a quadrant constituted nearly their entire supply of
profitable instruments. Behind closed doors teacher whispered to
pupil of certain flagrant discrepancies he had discovered between
his own calculations and those of Ptolemy.

For nearly three years Copernicus stayed at Bologna perfecting
his technique as an observer of the heavens under the tutelage of
Novara, reading eagerly all the sources of astronomy and studying
carefully every measurement and calculation he could lay hold of.
In 1500 he went to Rome, where the Jubilee Year was in progress.
Although he had not yet earned a degree at either of the two uni-
versities he had attended, he gave lectures on mathematics and even
ventured to offer the idea of the earth’s mobility as a possible ex-
planation for some astronomical phenomena. While at Rome he
had the opportunity of observing an eclipse of the moon, and in a
lecture on it won much applause for his masterful summation of
the mathematical implications of the event.

But now he had exhausted his leave of absence. The conclusion
of the Jubilee Year gave him no further excuse for prolonging his
furlough. Reluctantly he returned to Frauenburg and sought to
extend his leave. The thirst for study and knowledge had not yet
been quenched; there were still many things he wanted to know
before he could afford to turn his attention to the routine business
of being a priest. So he quite frankly told the authorities at Frauen-
burg that his education was not yet complete, that he wanted to
study medicine at Padua and, if possible, avail himself of the oppor-
tunity for a still wider knowledge of the Church law.

This was a clever move. He knew, and argued as much, that a
physician in their midst would be a valuable asset and that a more

COPERNICUS y ; : SI

profound understanding of the law of the Church would better fit
him to perform his duties.

So a new leave of absence was granted.

Back again in sunny Italy!

Every new idea seemed to have a representative at Padua, the
picturesque university city with its arcaded streets and charming
old Roman bridges. A medical school was located there with a repu-
tation that far outranked Bologna. This was just the kind of place
that a liberal would choose: a city celebrated for its Humanism,
its fine arts, its botanical garden, and its anatomical theater. Away
from the cold, dreary skies of the north, Copernicus again took up
his academic work with that intensity of application that he sus-
tained throughout his entire life, first as a student, then as an inves-
tigator, and finally as the greatest theorist of medieval Europe.

With several more years of study of medicine and mathematics
his leave had again expired. Student days were plainly over.

He bade farewell to Italy for the last time and returned to Erme-
land to fulfill his destiny in the great adventure of his life— tlie
perfection of a theory in which he would show to an astonished
humanity the eartlr moving through space!

On his return to Ermeland he was able to put off service in the
cathedral for yet another period. His uncle had very wisely attached
Copernicus to his castle at Heilsberg as his personal physician.
(Heilsberg was only about ten miles away from the cathedral at
Frauenburg.)

Now began a period of great activity for the future theorist. The
man who had studied medicine in order to prolong a leave of
absence turned out to be an excellent physician, and his services
were in demand by many nobles and friends of his uncle. Besides
this, he gave free medical treatment to the poor of the neigh-
borhood, a practice w'hich later stood him in good stead when
powerful enemies were seeking to undermine his reputation and
popularity. He interested himself in other questions too; politics,
Eurrency reform, literature, During hi§ stay at Heilsberg, we find

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

him translating into Latin the poetry of an ancient Greek writer,
Theophylactus Dimocatta. The translation is, to be suie, of little
interest to a student of the Copernican theory; but it is a sidelight
on the character of its translator. He showed himself courageous
by publishing it; for it declared him definitely a liberal and Hu-
manist at a time when the reaction against these movements had
become especially strong. It was this reputation which he acquired
for sympathetic liberalism that was to do him harm latei in life.

In spite of his wide-ranging activities, he continued to devote
nearly half of each day to study and observation of the heavens.
During the tedious journey home from Italy, he had had time to
examine and weigh all the evidence he had amassed concerning a
possible new astronomical system. Every shred of that evidence had
taken him farther and farther away from Ptolemy and nearer to
something quite new — quite unheard of since the days of those pagan
Greeks-something thoroughly revolutionary— the movement of the
earth around the sunl

One of the most easily observed and most interesting of the heav-
enly bodies is Mars, and it was upon this planet that Copernicus
first concentrated his attention-on the one hand spending as much
time in direct observation of it as possible, and on the other col-
lecting all available references to it in the reliable sources he had
at hand.

Of all the planets Mars was the oddest to watch in its course across
the sky. Night after night he charted its movements with the crude
instruments at hand and watched its speed diminish more and more
until finally it was at a complete standstill. Like his predecessors,
Copernicus waited for it to take up its Journey again. But to his
astonishment, when it began again to move, it was in the opposite
direction, back whence it came.

Again he saw the speed diminish, then die away altogether.
Again he observed the incredible phenomenon of a planet im-
movable in the sky. Arid again he saw it start once more to move,
this time in the original . direction. Now it continued, marching
across, the sky for a prolonged period. It seemed to have settled down
to niore conservative wa^s of life* When on the other side the

COPERNICUS 23

sky the same thing happened: the planet slowed down, stopped,
moved backwards, stopped again, and finally moved forward.

The same phenomenon he observed in Mars he found with varia-
tions in the courses of the other planets: obviously, if such a path
were the true and actual one, which, assuming the earth immovable,
must be the case, either the idea of a perfectly circular orbit must
be discarded and a weird meandering, lawless one substituted, or
one could adopt the Ptolemaic epicycles and attempt to fit a cumber-
some theory to these facts. Astronomers, Copernicus knew, had
always adopted the latter alternative. But he was dissatisfied, as we
have seen, with the hodgepodge of epicycles swarming in the
Ptolemaic heavens. He sought another explanation.

Besides, the planets, during the time that they performed their
backward maneuvers, became much greater both in light and ap-
parent size. Either they actually took on size, or— which was of
course the necessary solution— they came nearer to the earth. Here
was a phenomenon his predecessors had either ignored or talked
away— for the change in position was much too great to be ex-
plained by an epicycle however large or complicated.

So Copernicus turned now to his new theory which he had kept
in abeyance while he tested the old one. " Heliocentrism” (the sun
the center of the universe)— this was the way out! The old system
of “geocentrism” (the earth the center) had collapsed under the
weight of its own epicycles.

First of all, if the earth moved— a necessary deduction from that
assumption of heliocentrism— what did this motion consist of?
Calmly Copernicus weighed his data. All motion, he realized (Albert
Einstein has restated his proposition in the present century) was
the result of the motion either of the thing observed, or of the
observer, or of both. Assuming the sun to be the center, he saw
that the motion of the earth in respect to the sun was twofold.

The sun appeared each morning on the eastern horizon, passed
during the day to the western. This was a daily movement. What
other daily movements were there? Obviously, that of the rest of
the stars and planets and the moon, which each night moved
all together, across the sky. What was the corresponding daily
movement, then, of the earth? Copernicus’ mind immediately saw
the solution-axial rotatibn-that is, one complete revolution daily

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

of the earth upon its axis. Mathematical calculations, carefully car-
ried through-comparison with the figures of all those thousands
of predecessors whose measurements he respected equally with his
own— soon established to his satisfaction that his first deduction was
completely tenable. The earth actually revolved daily upon its axis,
always turning one side away from the sun as it did so and causing,
as a consequence, the commonplace phenomenon of day and night.

Was this all the earth’s movement? Inevitably the answer was
negative. That odd retrograde movement of the planets was not
yet explained. Nor were other anomalies cleared up by the daily
rotation— such, for instance, as the movement of the sun now nearer,
now farther away from the earth. None of. this could be made
understandable without elaborate systematization, nor as long as
one attributed the yearly revolution to the sun. Copernicus, follow-
ing his theory, realized that once more the trouble lay in imputing
to another body the motion which was actually the earth’s. What
really happened, he recognized (and established mathematically),
was that the annual revolution was of the earth around the sun,
sometimes closer to the sun and sometimes farther away.

He was quick to realize the altogether new revelation which this
view brought to one of the most perplexing problems of the ages; he
saw the implications of this theory sweeping through the cobwebs
of the centuries. Clearly this alone would lead astronomy out of
the blind alley of Ptolemaic geocentrism into the broad and sunlit
avenue of heliocentrism.

, 9 ^ ;

Knowledge advances by steps, not by leaps, and Copernicus was
in no hurry.

Like all the great theorists who followed him— Pasteur, Darwiii, .
Freud— he took time for further observation to test his ideas. There
was need for more checking-up and still further comparison of hi
own measurements with those of his predecessors. He believed '
he wais on the right path; now he was willing to demonstrate it.
But first to himself 1

The observatory at Heilsberg consisted only of a tower from f
which he might watch the skies. There were no instruments in the (-I
modern sense and so it was necessary to make allowances for the |
probable inaccuracy of his observations. Relying more strongly ■

COPERNICUS

upon the observations of others, regretting his own inability to
attain accuracy, he devoted himself nevertheless to the gradual com-
pilation of the most accurate table of planetary motions constructed
up to that time. It is strong testimony to his greatness that for the
working out of his theory he used clear-cut stark intelligence with-
out throwing upon unreliable figures more weight than they could
bear.

And the more he considered his idea the more he was struck with
its utter sanity and with the corresponding sheer absurdity of those
ideas which it must displace. For instance, all astronomers had for
centuries agreed that the sun was tremendously larger than the
earth. How absurd it was, he reasoned, dimly foreshadowing New-
ton’s law of universal gravitation, that a body comparatively so
small in mass as the earth should hold by its attraction not only
the enormously larger sun, but the planets, and the whole vast sphere
of fixed stars. How much more sensible it was to conceive of the
earth as one of the planets revolving about the great majestic sun
than of the whole universe, sun, planets, and all, as revolving each
day about the pin point of the earth. It was hard to conceive that
men should for so long have clung to such an absurdity.

Necessarily, however, all .contradictions were not solved immedi-
ately by his theory. Objections occurred to him, which, although
of minor importance, he realized could not be fully met until ade-
quate instruments had been devised to make more accurate and
detailed measurements.

There was, for instance, the problem of stellar parallax. Assum-
ing that the earth moved, how was one to explain that each fixed
star did not make a slight apparent shift in position (parallax) as
the earth moved from one side of its orbit to the other? The shift,
however slight, must be there, Copernicus argued; it was only that
* instruments to measure it were not available, and also that the
distance of the fixed stars was considerably greater than had been
supposed, so that the shift was infinitely smaller than would be
surmised.* :

As he began to submit the outlines of his theory to some of his

*Not until 1838 was stellar parallax finally lUeasured.. The German Bessel
observed it from ELonigsberg in the case of the star 61 CygnL . :

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

more intimate friends, another objection was brought to his atten-
tion. If Venus revolved about the sun, some argued, it should show
phases like the moon, as its bulk, passing between earth and sun,
obscured part of its light. The validity of this objection Copernicus
quickly recognized, and asserted that here also one must wait upon
the invention of more accurate instruments of observation. In God’s
good time, he added devoutly, the phases of Venus tvould be seen
by human eyes. His prophecy was fulfilled in 1616 when Galileo’s
telescope showed them clearly.

As time went on, he added further details to his theory, though
the main essentials were well worked out before he left Heilsberg.*
Overlooking no reasonable possibility, he even considered the
chance that an ellipse could abolish epicycles altogether. He had
hoped to investigate this idea elsewhere, and wrote to that effect, but
the years passed and the pressure of other affairs prevented such a
necessarily exhaustive analysis. Who know's what he might not have
accomplished had he been given time and sufficient facilities? But
life grew increasingly demanding and harsh, and the possibilities
of his youth were never completely realized. However, he wrote
down all his conclusions and arranged them in logical sequence,
so that in 1512, when his uncle died and he had to leave Heilsberg
to assume his full duties at the cathedral, he had a completed manu-
script ready for printing.

But he did not publish. Two things held him back: he had none
of the impetuousness of his zealous friends, and he knew' only too
well how much further revision and reworking his work required.
Nor was he so cocksure of his conclusions that he was willing to
release them before a hostile world.

What was more important was the attitude of the Church. Not
that he was prompted by piety; he was too intelligent a man to
believe for an instant that any part of his theory damaged true reli-
gion. But he was acutely aware that his colleagues w-ere not as
broadminded as he; they might easily take amiss the promulgation
of a doctrine that tore up a part of their teaching and tossed it to

• These essentials are: the sun at the center of the universe; Venus and Mer-
cury and the earth revolving about iq the moon circling the earth in its regular
2TV3 &a.j period; and the other planets; Mars,. Jupiter and Saturn, swinging
around the sun in that orda d£ distatu*.

COPERNICUS 27

oblivion. He was a liberal, a Humanist, known as such, and the
Humanists were not in high favor.

Publication could therefore wait. And it did— for Copernicus was
in no mood to subject himself to an inquisition.

At Frauenburg facilities for observation were rather better than
they had been at his uncle’s castle. Copernicus chose a room on the
tower from which the view in all directions save one was quite
unobstructed. Only in the east was his vision barred by the great
mass of the cathedral. He realized that at last he had come to a
permanent situation, and he therefore proceeded to make altera-
tions in his room that would aid him in his observations, which
from now on were to be devoted to the retesting and the rechecking
of his theory.

The modern observatory has what is called a meridian transit tele-
scope which swings in a vertical plane— the meridian, which the sun
passes at noon. Every star in the sky travels past this plane in the
course of twenty-four hours. By marking the time at which each star
makes its transit a clear record of its movements can be drawn.
Copernicus, of course, had no telescope, but he arranged a vertical
slit in the wall and night after night he noted the transit of the
planets and compared his figures with those upon which he had
originally computed. He measured the altitudes of the stars above
the horizon by means of a quadrant. Thus he was able to gauge the
meanderings and shifts in direction that counted for so much in his
theory.

Unfortunately, the pressure of affairs at Frauenburg became more
urgent than ever. His services as a physician were constantly in
demand, now by the new bishop, now by his friends and acquaint-
ances all over Ermeland. At one time he was called to far-away
Konigsberg, in Ducal Prussia, for his medical skill had become
widely known.

His fame as an astronomer also was spreading. In 1514 he was
invited by the Lateran Council to join other astronomers in the
long-needed revision of the calendar, Here was an opportunity, if
he wanted, to gain considerable publicity for his theory: he had
only to go to the Council and show how die calendar must be

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

revised, if at all, in the light of the new theory. But he did not
consider the time ripe— he was still a young and healthy man— to
thrust his head into the lion’s mouth. He rejected the Council’s
invitation, explaining that he considered all efforts at calendar |

revision useless, since the course of the sun and the moon were ;

so imperfecdy known.

11 V ' "

The years passed and his theory withstood relentless testing in the
light of his own renewed measurements. As he gained more cour-
age, he began to communicate his results to a wider circle of friends.

In 1522 he wrote a brief commentary in which he gave a general
outline of his theory in non-technical terms. This little manuscript
had a wide circulation. Men of science were quick to recognize i

what it implied. Its fame soon spread to Italy, where the Pope ;

heard of it. And now an amusing thing happened. Pope Leo X, the |

first to be confronted with the heliocentric idea, failed to be wor- |

ried by it in the slightest! On the contrary, he requested one of his ;

cardinals to write to Copernicus and ask for some mathematical
demonstrations of his thesis.

Leo X looked on the theory as a mere hypothesis. It even assumed
for a while the aspect of a “pet” idea at the Papal court; in fact,
Copernicus became quite the fashion. No one apparently dreamed
of taking the young astronomer seriously; and besides, the mathe-
matical demonstrations of his views were not known, so that their i
danger as potential truths was apparently minimized.

But if the Catholic Church was slow in realizing the menace to
its dogma that lay in the new doctrine, the Protestants w'ere not!
Luther, Copernicus’ contemporary, was highly indignant and con-
temptuous of the astronomer. Did not the Bible definitely state that
Joshua bade the sun and not the earth stand still? What sort of
fool was this Copernicus that he turned his back on Holy Scripture
and common sense? Probably just a vain fellow seeking a dubious
notoriety through sensational pronouncements. And in this opinion
Luther’s colleague Melanchthon wholeheartedly concurred,
w But Copernicus, having decided to withhold final publication in-
definitely and to continue to disseminate his teachings orally to ,
a limited group of friends, did not waste time in refuting his
enemies. He had his hands full, what with his church duties and

COPERNICUS sg

private affairs, without taking time to squabble with quibblers and
theologians.

He had grown to be quite a prominent figure in the chapter
at Frauenburg; he represented it diplomatically on many missions,
and brought fame to it through his medical and astronomical skill.
In 1522 he wrote, at the request of King Sigismund, an essay on the
reform of the currency of Prussia which had long been depredated
by a series of disastrous wars. For a period of some five or six years
he was chosen to be administrator of the city of Allenstein where
he had all he could do to check the depredations of marauding
bands of robber knights. And when the bishop died in 1537 Coper-
nicus was among those mentioned as his successor.

But this bishop’s death marked the beginning of a gloomy period
for Copernicus, for the new bishop bore him no love. No one knows
exactly whence arose the enmity that Johannes Dantiscus bore him;
but it certainly existed and showed itself in many annoying and
irritating ways. It may have been that Dantiscus resented the efforts
of Copernicus on behalf of Tiedemann Giese, his dearest friend,
in the latter’s competition with Dantiscus for the bishop’s miter.
Or it may have been that Dantiscus, after a licentious youth, had
turned fanatically devout and resented the well-known fact of
Copernicus’ liberalism and Humanist leanings. At any rate, the last
few years of the astronomer’s life were embittered by incessant
quarrels.

The affair of Anna Schillings was typical. This woman, a distant
relative of Copernicus, had been engaged by the astronomer as
his housekeeper. The new bishop cast a stern eye upon the two,
and finally deciding that the sixty-five-year-old Copernicus was carry-
ing on a liaison with the fair Anna, straightway demanded Coper-
nicus to dismiss her and never to see her again. Seeking to avoid
trouble Copernicus complied. But the bishop’s suspicions continued;
he kept pestering Copernicus with reports that he had been seen
with the Schillings woman here and there. It was, to be sure, bitter
gall for Copernicus to have to throw his household out of gear in
order to please a young zealot who, having a wife and daughter

go ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

in Spain, relics of Ms more natural days, thought himself qualified

to Cast the first stone. . .

With Dantiscus constantly harassing him, Copernicus continued
to put off publication of his work. It was now virtually completed
and ready for the printer; nevertheless he had calmly resignec him-
self to the prospect of dying without seeing his theory publis ied.

He thought it best to leave to others the task of issuing his wok.
posthumously. And he would have done so had not something
unusual happened. There came to visit him one spring day in 1539
a young man, Joachim Rheticus, from the Protestant University of

Wittenberg.

Rheticus had been teaching mathematics in Germany when ru-
mors of Copernicus’ new theory reached him. Like so many of the
astronomers and mathematicians of the age, he too was dissatisfied
with the Ptolemaic system which the clear light of heliocentiism
had only made more absurd. He obtained leave of absence to visit
Copernicus in order that he might learn from the astronomer the
details of his theory. Originally intending to stay but three months,
Rheticus remained instead nearly three years. This in itself was a
daring bit of action considering that he was a Lutheran in a Cath-
olic country where the bishop of that particular diocese was hostile j
toward all Protestants. But Rheticus stayed on, and it was he who
finall y persuaded Copernicus to publish his work. When the final
revision was finished, Rheticus took the completed manuscript to
Niimberg for publication.

Copernicus, still anxious to avert papal displeasure, dedicated his
work to the Pope, hoping thereby to gain for his views the pio-
tection of the Church. Aware that the new theory was destined to
smash a large part of Catholic dogma, he hoped to make the iii' j
evitable reconciliation easier by issuing the work under the auspices
of the Church.

However careful he was to smooth the path of acceptance for
his theory, he was unwilling and adamant against any attempt at
compromise. What he had discovered and patiently worked out he
knew to be unassailable, and he would allow no evasions of mean-
ing in order to soften a clause here or blunt the point of an argu-
'■ ment,''''there.'

COPERNICUS

He asserted his unwillingness for any compromise when he re-
ceived a letter from Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran preacher inter-
ested in astronomy and mathematics, whom Rheticus had left in
charge at Niirnberg. Osiander suggested that the work be offered
as a hypothesis, pure and simple, bearing no relation to the actual
facts other than to serve as a good working basis for calculations.
In this way, Osiander suggested, there would be no conflict at all
with Ptolemaic astronomy and religious dogma.

Copernicus sternly rejected the proposal.

The year 1542 passed by, and the astronomer, now in his seven-
tieth year, went about his ecclesiastical duties, waiting for his book
to come from the press. But in the beginning of the winter he
was taken seriously ill. A series of paralytic strokes and severe hem-
orrhages laid him low. When the year 1543 opened, the friends who
gathered about his bedside knew that they were waiting the end.

But life dragged on over the winter. Copernicus grew weaker and
weaker, sinking into long periods of unconsciousness. He was ready
to die, but he had one last wish— he wanted to see his book. Spring-
time came, and with it a particularly prolonged period of uncon-
sciousness in the month of May. On the 24th he awakened for the
last time, very weak. A messenger was standing by with a copy
of his book. He thrust it into the hands of the dying theorist who
had just enough strength to scan its title page. He smiled faintly,
attempted to turn a page— his eyes closed.

Nicolaus Copernicus was dead.

The name of the book was called De Revolutionihus Orbium
Coelestium (Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies).

Copernicus saw only the title page and he died with a smile on
his lips. Had he turned that page he would have discovered perfidy
—the treachery of Osiander. For that coward, disregarding Coper-
nicus’ explicit injunction, had inserted a preface to the work in
which he incorporated the suggestion that the theory be presented
merely as an “interesting hypothesis.” Worse still, no name was
signed to the interpolation, so that all readers assumed it was
Copernicus himself who had sought to save his hide at the expense

32 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Copernicus’ friends were indignant at the fraud and sought to ;
have it exposed, but their efforts were fruitless. That is how it came
about that the first of the great theories of mankind entered the
world under false pretenses.

- Undoubtedly, Osiander’s preface served its purpose well; for
nearly half a century after the death of Copernicus only vague mut-
terings here and there gave token that the Church was aware of
the new doctrine. But before the century was over, there appeared
the man who, quite alone, presented the Copernican theory w'ith
all its implications to the opposition of the Church.

This man was Giordano Bruno, born in 1548 near Naples.

15 !

When Giordano Bruno was fifteen years old he entered the Do- :
minican Order; at twenty-four he fled from his monastery because ;
suspicions of heresy had accumulated against him. He was said to
have entertained doubts as to the nature of the Trinity, and to have
made various statements which his conservative hearers felt it their :
duty to report to the ecclesiastical authorities. When Bruno learnt f
of the agitation against him he left Naples and began to travel. ;

It was about this time that he became acquainted with the rvork
of Copernicus. In possession of a free and untrammeled spirit, he
had no doubt of the validity of the new astronomy. The only ques-
tion to be raised was: How far could humanity pursue this new
revelation?— that is, how far could one push the Copernican theory
to its ultimate philosophical and scientific conclusion? Bruno’s
answer to that question was to be the signal for the start of the ;
first great battle of theology against the advances of modern science.

Bruno went to Rome first, and there offered an example of the i
recklessness that he displayed throughout his life. A fugitive from
the Inquisition at Naples, he sought refuge in Rome at the very |
convent where the Roman Inquisition had its headquarters! But [
luck was with him, and he was able to move to Venice, Padua, and |
then on to Geneva in Switzerland which was the home of Prot- ,
estantism. Here also he came into conflict with the authorities,
for he did not hesitate to express his contempt for the new
Protestantism which lie regarded equal to orthodoxy in its shallow- [
ness, With magnificent unconcern he lectured in Geneva against the |

COPERNICUS

old astronomy, championing Copernicus; and to make things worse
for himself he printed railing denunciations against de la Faye,
one of the leading professors. Geneva soon became unhealthy for
him, and he moved on to France, first to Toulouse, and then to
Paris, where he enjoyed considerable vogue as a brilliant conver-
sationalist, an engaging lecturer, a fierce and unrelenting debater
and a striking personality. With his penchant for satirizing all man-
ner of assininity, it is no wonder that the liberals in the French
capital took him warmly to heart. But despite his great popularity
he did not remain there very long and we next find him on his way
to the British Isles.

In England he came into conflict with the Oxford dons, a group
of men who were the very essence of everything hidebound. And
here again, in true Bruno fashion, he did not spare his opponents.
He dug a sharp-pointed pen into their sensitive flesh, pouring into
each wound the vitriol of a biting invective. Not content with this
he hurled the mass of his tremendous erudition against their card-
board intelligence. It was simply too much for them. After six
years of treading on the conservative toes of London, he returned
to Paris for a brief visit. When we pick up the thread of his wan-
derings again we find him at various universities in Europe. He
studied and lectured, always hewing to the line of his argument
which pushed the Copemican doctrine farther and farther to its
ultimate application.

At the University of Marburg he asked the authorities for the
right to speak in public. Evidently his reputation as an iconoclast
had preceded him, for the privilege was denied by the rector who
wrote the following account in his register for that day: “When the
right of publicly teaching philosophy was denied him by me for
weighty reasons, he blazed out, grossly insulting me in my own
house, protesting! was acting against the law of nations, the cus-
tom of all the universities of Germany and all the schools of hu-
manity. He refused then to become a member of the university—
accordingly his fee was readily returned, and his name erased from
the album.”

A month later Bruno lectured at Wittenberg before going to
Helmstadt where the rector of the evangelical church issued a sen-
tence of excommunication against him. It caused Bruno no annoy-

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

ance— he merely shrugged his shoulders~(“It is more blessed to be
wise in truth in the face of opinion than to be wise in opinion in
the face of truth.”)-and moved on once more, this time to Frank-
furt-am-Main where he remained for nearly two years.

All during his travels he had been thinking and developing his
philosophy and at the same time leaving behind him a trail of
brilliant books, pamphlets, and essays in which the fruit of Coper-
nicus’ great work was reaped.

What was there in Bruno’s philosophy that so bitterly aroused
the antagonism of the universities of Europe just as they were be-
ginning to awaken from the dreariness of medievalism?

That which was implicit in the Copernican theory Bruno stated
bluntly, namely: that the earth had been displaced as the center
of the universe; that with the earth no longer central man also
lost his post of center; that the earth was not the hub of a great
universe created for its inhabitants, but a tiny planet among an in-
finitude of stars throughout the great infinity of space. In other
words, the earth was nothing more than a minute speck in a meas-
ureless universe.

While Copernicus had expanded the universe enormously, he did
not venture to maintain the infinity of the universe. For him, as for
the older astronomers, there remained the thought of a universe
bounded. Bruno broke these bounds and boldly asserted the exist-
ence of numberless worlds in space illimitable. He formed a more
comprehensive notion of the new theory than Copernicus himself.

Bruno was satisfied that Copernicus’ work had shown that the
world was demonstrably capable of infinity. And why should it not
be? Was not God omnipotent? Why should He, being omnipotent,
will to create a world with limitations? Bruno could accept noth-
ing less than an infinite world without bounds. “This world,” he
declared, “is merely one of an infinite number of particular worlds
similar to this, and all the planets and other stars are infinite worlds
without number comprising an infinite universe, so that there is
a double infinitude: that of the greatness of the universe and that
of the multitude of the worlds.”

With words like these BrUno tore from the Copernican theory

COPERNICUS 35

the casuistic veil Osiander’s preface had placed over it. He trans-
lated into popular thought the implications of the Copernican
theory which had been realized heretofore by only a few. No longer
was it advanced as “an interesting hypothesis.” On the contrary,
he hurled it at the Church in all its hard and overwhelming truth.
His arguments for and his deductions from Copernicus were now
placed in direct opposition to the great body of Catholic tradi-
tion, for Bruno was loud and determined Tn his insistence that
the facts of astronomy be taken at their full face value and that
truth must be known despite dogma or any vague “necessity for
faith.” Pushed to its ultimate significance this meant that the Church
would have to revise not only its physical conception of the world,
but also its spiritual conception as well. The all-importance of man
as the most perfect and significant of God’s creatures had long been
a fundamental doctrine of Catholic dogma. But Bruno argued that,
inasmuch as the earth is not the entire universe nor even the center
of the universe, the word “Catholic” had lost its meaning. What
Church could claim to be universal and catholic, and offer salva-
tion to all life, which dominated only an insignificant speck of a
planet among an infinity of stars?

Nor was this blow solely aimed at the Church. The idea of man’s
central importance had been treasured through countless ages— by
the Greeks, the Arabs, the Hindus, the Romans, the Chinese. Bruno
showed that the Copernican theory justified an altogether different
emphasis upon man’s place in the universe: he became an incident
in the history of a small planet. Apparently a terrific blow had
been struck at man’s vanity by the comparatively simple process
of substituting the sun for the earth as the center of the planetary
motions!

By thus stripping the Copernican theory of all evasions and sub-
terfuges Bruno brought home to the Church the alarming nature
of the new astronomy. At the same time he prepared the way that
was soon to lead to his own destruction.

In view of all these things it would appear to have been sheer
foolhardiness on his part to leave Frankfurt and go to Venice (within
easy grasp of the Church) at the invitation of a Venetian nobleman.

Giovanni Mocenigo. It may have been his eternal restlessness-
or perhaps the expectation that in Venice he could enjoy the society
o£ his countrymen from whom he had been so long parted. It is
known for certain that he received assurances of protection from
Mocenigo; and banking on those promises he went to Venice.

Now Mocenigo was probably a paid spy of the Inquisition which
was seeking to capture Bruno. He had told Bruno that he wanted
to be instructed in the so-called magic arts. Bruno was, of course,
fully aware of his inability to teach any such nonsense, and when
he arrived in Venice he reminded Mocenigo of it. The \^enetian
nobleman was sure Bruno was withholding his knoxvledge, hoard-
ing it, miser-like, to render it the more valuable. He thereupon
planned to trap him. First he would try to get all he could out of the
philosopher and then to turn him over to the Inquisition for
heresy.

Growing bored with his dull pupil, who kept pestering him with
silly questions, Bruno announced his intention of leaving Venice.
But before he had a chance to pack his things his apartment was
invaded by six gondoliers who made him a prisoner in Mocenigo’s
house. On the next day Mocenigo lodged a formal denunciation of
his guest with the office of the Inquisition which immediately trans-
ferred him to the local dungeons.

Several weeks later he was taken from the prison of the Inquisi-
tion to appear before the court. With a clear realization of his
danger he became more moderate in speech, maintaining that his
teachings were not heresy but philosophically valid and distinct
from religion which was a matter of faith. He declared also that
Aristotle’s work was much more directly contrary to the Church
than his own. In order to clear himself he finally made a formal
abjuration of any errors he may have committed and asked for
absolution.

His case looked fairly promising. He might have escaped xvith
only a penance and an injunction to resume the cowl of the Do-
minicans, if Rome, now grown fully aware of the danger to the
Church contained in Bruno’s chtopioning of Copernicus, had not
insisted that he be extradited and given over to the central Inqui-
sition for questioning'. This was done, and he was incarcerated in
the dungeon at Rome in February, 1593.

}

COPERNICUS

For six years he languished in the Roman dungeons.

Delegation after delegation of theologians and monks went to
his cell seeking to induce him to abjure his teachings. Rome was
fully prepared to battle to the end; but how much greater a con-
quest it would be for the Church if this brilliant mind could be
won over to the doctrines of the Faith instead of fighting against
them. For six long years they argued with him, threatened him,
berated him, in an effort to coax him back to orthodoxy and the
service of the Pope. But it was all to no avail for Bruno stuck to
his colors and would not retreat. “It is a poor mind,” he declared,
“that will think with the multitude because it is multitude: truth
is not altered by the opinions of the vulgar or the confirmation of
the many.”

Finally, in February, 1599, he was brought before the Holy Office
of the Inquisition at the same convent where he had once sought
refuge when fleeing from Naples. His heresies were recited, and
then he was excommunicated and stripped of his priestly and mo-
nastic offices. Still he refused the opportunity to recant.

Lastly, he was handed .over by the Church to secular authorities
“to be punished with all clemency and without effusion of blood”
—the conventional formula for burning at the stake. Bruno, aware
to what he had come, stood proudly before his judges and spoke
piercing words: “You who sentence me are in greater fear than
I who am condemned.”

Eight days more he xvaited in a dungeon while fresh efforts were
made to force him to recant. Obdurate to the last, he refused every
invitation of his exhorters to yield.

On February 17, they led him to the stake in the Campo di Fiore.
While the flames mounted a crucifix was offered him to kiss, as was
the custom. Sternly he turned his face away from the symbol. Those
who witnessed his death— and they were his enemies— testify that
no cry or groan escaped him.

The fear of death was no part of Bruno’s philosophy. “I have
fought,” he asserted in language strongly reminiscent of Socrates;
“that is much— victory is in the hands of fate. Be that as it may
with me, this at least future ages wiU not deny of me, be the victor

g8 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

who may-that I did not fear to die, yielded to none of my fellows
in constancy, and preferred a spirited death to a cowardly life.

On his journey to Venice Bruno had spent a few weeks in Padua.
Shortly after he had left tliat city to visit Mocenigo, the University
of Padua extended a teaching invitation to a young man \vho was
the next in line to carry forward the theory of Copernicus. That
teacher was Galileo Galilei-the “creator of modern science follow-
ing in the steps of its prophet.”

With the advent of Galileo true experimental science was born;
and with it was sounded the death knell of many old beliefs
founded upon tradition, hearsay, dogma, and misinterpretation of
the evidence of nature. From the moment that Galileo abandoned
the study of medicine for mathematics and physics, he insisted upon
putting the ancient beliefs to test. And how the old unquestioned
assumptions began to fall to the ground! For example, he attacked
the so-called law that a heavier body falls faster than a light one.
In the presence of his adversaries at the University of Pisa he
climbed to the top of the famous Leaning Tower and let fall
simultaneously two weights, one a hundred times heavier than the
other. Those who came to scorn sat mute as the two bodies struck
the ground at precisely the same time— exactly as Galileo had
predicted.

But the evidence of their own eyes was too painful and shocking.
“This meddlesome man must be suppressed,” murmured the uni-
versity fathers as they quit the square in utter embarrassment. So
Galileo was forced by their denunciations to leave Pisa and accept
an invitation to teach at the University of Padua. He had long
been acquainted with Copernicus’ ideas which struck him as ines-
capably logical, but still he held off a little before venturing to
proclaim publicly his adherence to the new astronomy. Soon he
gathered courage. First he made private confession of his belief
to another astronomer, Johann Kepler, and then to a few intimate
friends. In 1598 he was re-elected to his professorship with an
increase in salary which made him surer of himself but not too
sure.

In all probability Galileo would have been more outspoken had

COPERNICUS 39

not the shocking news of Bruno’s burning at the stake (1600)
frightened him into silence. However, an event of the year 1604
finally gave him an opportunity to speak. In this year astronomers
were astonished to see appear a Stella nova— a. new star— which
flashed brightly in the heavens, faded, and then disappeared. Gali-
leo was gleeful. Of all the crude ideas of Ptolemy that had been
accepted by people and Church that of the unchangeableness of
the heavens was among the most cherished. Yet here, right before
one’s very eyes, a change in the makeup of the sky had come about.
Galileo immediately went to work. In three lectures he explained
the phenomenon in the light of the newer astronomy that was now
taking shape. (The significance of Copernicus lies in the fact that he
prepared the w^ay for Galileo.) The attendance at his lectures was
tremendous.

Encouraged by his success, he went further in demolishing the
ideas of the older astronomy and soon gained the bitter enmity
of his colleagues. But his popularity was yet large enough to pro-
tect him; he went unmolested for the time being.

Five years after the appearance of the Stella nova, a mighty in-
strument for the advancement of astronomy was thrust into Gali-
leo’s hands. Rumors had come to him of the invention by a Dutch-
man of a glass contrivance with which distant objects might be
seen much nearer and larger. Galileo realized at once the impor-
tance of this discovery. In a moment of inspiration, without wait-
ing to see the invention, he went about constructing a telescope
for himself. By placing lenses at either end of a lead tube he began
to reveal the mysteries of the stars.

Discovery after discovery now rained in his lap. To his amaze-
ment he could count ten times as many stars as were visible to the
unaided eye! First he found that the planet Jupiter, which the older
astronomers had assigned to its solitary orbit far remote from the
central earth, was not solitary at all: four moons were attending
it. Certainly now the whole structure of the old planetary system
of Ptolemy was gone.

More was to follow.

He now turned his glass upon the sun and quickly discovered
that this majestic orb (held by the Church to demonstrate the per-
fection of creation) had spots upon it. Furthermore, the spots moved

architects of ideas

from one side of the great body to the other-proving, therefore,
that the sun revolved on its own axis. And the moons of Jupiter
turned about it, each in its own orbit. In other words, here were
four planets which definitely did not revolve about the earth.
Next, the moon showed itself under the telescope to be no smooth,
even body, but rough and pocked with craters and mountains and
valleys. Where was the old perfectibility and immutability of the
planets taught by ecclesiastical revelation? _

To the orthodox astronomers who had just awakened to the
danger of Copernicanism and had marshaled their arguments
against it, the most crushing blow of all was the fulfillment of
Copernicus’ prophecy regarding the phases of Venus. Through the
telescope these phases were plainly discernible.

It will be remembered that in the plan of the solai system con-
ceived by Copernicus, the planets Mercury and Venus are nearer
the sun than is the earth. In the course of their revolution around
the sun (to which they owe their light) Copernicus claimed that
these two planets must exhibit phases like those through which
the moon passes. Although Copernicus could not prove this to be
true, he claimed, in consequence of his theory, that some day the
proof would be forthcoming.

And so it happened.

In the year 1610 when Galileo turned his telescope on Venus
he saw changes in the planet exactly like the changes of the moon.
“We are absolutely compelled to say, declared Galileo, that Venus
and Mercury also revolve around the sun, as do also all the rest
of the planets-a truth believed indeed by the Pythagorean school,
by Copernicus, and by Kepler, but never proved by the evidence of
our senses as it is now proved in the case of Venus and Mercury.”

■ In these words Galileo summed up the final unanswemble argu-
ment for the Copernican theory.

One might suppose that in view of these revelations the oppo^
sition to Copernicus would have gradually subsided, however
( grudgingly. Nothing of the sort happened. The telescope was de-
nounced as an instrument of the devil who sought to delude man-
kind. Orthodox astfQfiQmeir& refused to look through the glass.

COPERNICUS

arguing in characteristic style that in order to see any moons near
Jupiter man had to make an instrument which would create them.

. The most amusing of the arguments launched against Galileo
were those of Francesco Sizzi in regard to the satellites of Jupiter.
He argued that there had to be seven planets, no more, no less;
for were there not seven windows in the head (two eyes, two nos-
trils, two ears and a mouth)? Was not the week made up of seven
days? Furthermore, the days of the week had been named for the
planets. “If we increase the number of the planets,” continued Sizzi,
“this whole system falls to the ground.” And to top it all oflE, Sizzi
added; “Moreover, the satellites were invisible to the naked eye,
and therefore can have no influence on the earth, and therefore
would be useless, and therefore do not exist.”

Galileo was permitted to go along for a short while without
molestation. In 1611 he paid a visit to Rome and was graciously
received by the Pope. But this triumph was short-lived. Four years
later he was summoned again to Rome and succeeded in con-
vincing the Pope of the logic of his arguments. But the storm
was brewing. It finally broke when Galileo was denounced to the
Holy Office of the Inquisitor which excused his errors upon his
promise not to repeat them. Stirred by the heresy of the new astron-
omy, the College of Cardinals met in i6i6 and formally condemned
the Copernican doctrine. This time they exacted from Galileo a
promise never to teach or maintain it again.

The theologians were assured now that this damnable heresy was
done with. Galileo was permitted to return home and resume
teaching upon the strict understanding that he was to ignore the
Copernican theory altogether. As an additional safeguard against
Copernican ideas the works of the new astronomy were placed upon
the Index of Prohibited Books; the Cardinals had proscribed un-
equivocally “all books which affirm the motion of the earth..” And!
there the matter rested for nearly fifteen years..

In 1630 Galileo once more dared to present the Copernican
theory. Encouraged by the accession to the Papal throne of an old
friend. Cardinal Barberini, he wrote a brilliant work in which he
sought to evade the promise he, had rqade by presenting both' the

4 2 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Ptolemaic and Copernican theories together, in the form of a
dialogue, so that he could not be accused of either affirming or
denying Copernicus. He wrote also, at the instance of the Papal
censor, a pious preface in which he threw ridicule on the Coperni-
can theory as wild and fantastic and contrary to Holy Scripture.
In this form the censor permitted it to pass, whereupon the censor
lost his own job and brought Galileo face to face with an angry
Inquisition.

The dialogues were published in Italian and -were an instan-
taneous success. The pious preface brought laughter down upon
the Church that had allowed herself to be fooled by such an obvious
pretense. How could it have been otherwise when the clear truth
of Copernicus was placed in juxtaposition to the stark nonsense
of Ptolemy? All over Europe people were reading Galileo while
the Pope and his Cardinals in Rome grew furious at the trick that
had been played upon them.

Galileo was once more denounced and summoned to appear
immediately before the Central Inquisition. Sick in body, the old
man— he was now sixty-six— was forced to leave home and make the
long journey from Florence to the Vatican. Arriving there he faced
the Inquisition once again. But this time no leniency awaited him.

Altogether he appeared four times for examination. First he
claimed that his new work confuted Copernicus rather than upheld
him. Then he promised to write further dialogues making this
clearer. Then under pressure he admitted that he may have been
“misleading” and vain of his own skill in debate, w'hich may have
led him to set up stronger arguments for the Copernican system
than he was able to refute. Next he asserted that he had not broken
his promise, which had been not to hold or defend the doctrine,
for he had merely discussed it. In his last examination, held behind
closed doors, his spirit was thoroughly broken. At the order of
the Pope, whose friend he had been, he was subjected to the In-
quisition’s tortures until he finally signed a complete and final
abjuration of all his errors: “I Galileo Galilei, being in my seven-
tieth year,” he recited on his knees before the tribunal, “having
before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands,
abjure, curse and detest the error and heresy of the movement

COPERNICUS

does move,"),

of the earth." * At the same time he promised he would denounce
to the Inquisition any other scientist found to be upholding Goper-
nican ideas.

Now that the Inquisition had him in hand he was sentenced to
imprisonment for the rest of his life and exiled from his friends
and family. Strictly carried out, this order remained in force for
nearly nine years. At the end of that time, 1642, blind, broken,
seventy-eight years old, Galileo died.

Apparently the churchmen had been successful. They had hounded
the leading scientist of the age, humiliated him and finally brought
jii'm to an ignominious death. They had published his abjuration
throughout Europe and demonstrated their power to make men

recant. ^

But all their efforts v?ere in vain. For the career of the Copernican

theory continued unchecked.

To other men descended the task of completing the Copernican
conquest. Bruno had advanced it fearlessly, and Galileo had acceler-
ated it with experimentation and indisputable observation. Now
Johann Kepler (1571-1630) went about the business of perfect-
ing it. r rr- v T) l.

But before Kepler there was the tragic figure of Tycho Brahe

the great Danish astronomer who, in his student days, fought a
duel at Rostock, had his nose sliced off, and replaced it with a
<rold and silver dummy. Brahe (1546-1601) did many noteworthy
Slings: he devised a simple means of determining latitude and was
the first astronomer to give serious study to the comets. But un-
questionably his most important achievement was the traimng o
his assistant Johann Kepler whom he urged “to lay a solid founda-
tion for his views by actual observation, and then by ascending from
these to strive to reach the cause of things.”

The scion of a noble house, Tycho Brahe surrendered the good
will of his family in order to pursue the study of mathematic;
but his ability earned him the admiration of the Danish king who

• There is an old and persistent legend to the effect that GaWeo on making
this confession muttered to himself the words, E pw si mmve ( Nevertheless it

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

now became his royal protector and gave him an island near Elsi-
nore and enough money to build an elaborate observatory. Here
for many years Brahe worked and watched his beloved stars, com-
pleting the finest astronomical tables ever worked out. Here also
he achieved that pathetic compromise known as the Tychonic sys-
tem by which he sought to get rid of the difficulties of the Ptolemaic
astronomy while staving off the revolutionary theory of Copernicus.
The Tychonic system endeavored to put the old astronomy in order
by keeping the earth motionless at the center of the universe and
having the sun and moon revolve about it (yielding to Copernicus
only to the extent of having the other planets go round the sun) .

Upon the death of his patron and protector, King Frederick II,
Brahe was forced to leave his Danish island. He withdretv to the
city of Prague where he obtained the patronage of the local mon-
arch. It was here in Prague that Johann Kepler came to join him.

Brahe’s attempts at compromise prevented him from becoming a
true Copernican. But this much must be said in his honor: that he
extended to the improverished and destitute Kepler a very great
friendship and put at the disposal of his guest a vast amount of
careful -work which enabled Kepler to clear away the ambiguities
and inaccuracies that prevented a full acknowledgment of the Co-
pernican theory.

Kepler was a Copernican from the first day that his brillaint mind
encountered the De Revolutionibus. And throughout his life, filled
with financial troubles, mishaps and sickness, he held steadily to
that theory. He was invited by Brahe to join him in his investi-
gations. Out of this union of astronomical minds the world was
given three fundamental formulations of planetary motion known
as Kepler’s laws.

Nothing angered Kepler quite so much as the stupidity of those
who opposed Copernican ideas without having an elementary
knowledge of mathematics. When he came to write his book which
he called Introduction upon Mars he excoriated the vicious med-
dlers. “He who is so stupid as not to comprehend the science of
astronomy,” wrote Kepler, “or so weak and scrupulous as to think
it an offense of piety to adhere to Copernicus, him I advise, that
leaving the study of astronomy, and censuring the opinions of phi-

COPERNICUS

iosophers at pleasure, he betake himself to his own concerns, and
that desisting from further pursuit of these intricate studies, he
keep at home and manure his own ground.”

Kepler was admirably successful in carrying the Copernican
theory still farther away from the old order: he abandoned the
circle and epicycle completely in plotting the orbits of the planets,
substituting for ail the devious arrangements of Plato, Aristotle,
and even Copernicus the simple, yet at that time little understood,
ellipse. An ellipse is a flattened circle, and Kepler found that by
assuming the path of each planet to be an ellipse, with the sun
in one focus, all the phenomena were finally satisfied. We have
seen how close Copernicus came to making this discovery for
himself. Unfortunately he never had the opportunity to under-
take a full exploration of its possibilities. But even if he had it is
not likely that he could have even remotely reached the definite-
ness of Kepler’s conclusions. All previous astronomers had assumed
the existence of uniform circular movement; and it was only when
Kepler abandoned this view that he was led to the truths embodied
in his three famous laws of planetary motion.

After Kepler’s laws had become common property the Coper-
nican theory progressed more rapidly. Not that it received universal
acceptance. By no means. As soon as it was seen that some ground
must be yielded by the older astronomy a number of compromises
were tried. Among these the Tychonic system was perhaps the most
popular. The learned Jesuit Riccioli, vainly endeavoring to put life
into a mummy, published in 1651 what was called The New
Almagest, in which he proposed still another conciliation in a pious
attempt to avoid admitting the painful fact of the earth’s motion.

But it was all a waste of energy. The old astronomy was now
hopelessly shattered; it could no longer be denied that the stars of
the firmament nodded their approval of the Copernican doctrine.
To serious men of science Ptolemy and all that he stood for were
irretrievably gone. The old astronomical structure which the medi-
eval scholars and theologians had built upon his teachings and
supported by that most highly prized of all oriental anthologies,
the Bible, had been cast into the limbo of outworn ideas. After
having endured for fifteen hundred years it was to be no more..

2. Hutton

, . . . THEORY OF THE
STRUCTURE OF THE EARTH

OUR knowledge of the structure of the earth is so very recent
that writers and commentators on the subject never fail to express
astonishment over the antiquity of astronomy as compared to the
modernity of geology. Why did man so long neglect the study of
his own planet in order to gaze at objects millions of miles away
from him?

The purpose of this chapter is to trace tire early beginnings of
man’s awareness of the earth and its physical features and to show
how this original curiosity led up to a profound understanding
of the history of our planet. From time immemorial man has been
in possession of all kinds of theories relating to the origin of his
earth. These theories on origins (called cosmogonies) are discussed
in another chapter. Here we confine ourselves to those thoughts
touching the nature of the structure of this midget globe— our
earth. “This subject,” declared James Hutton in the opening para-
graphs of his Theory of the Earth, “is important to the human race,
to the possessor of this world, to the intelligent being, man, who
foresees events to come, and who, in contemplating his future
interest, is led to enquire concerning causes, in order that he may
judge of events which otherwise he could not know.”

Men have always lived on the soil and they have always been in
the presence of rivers, hills, valleys, lakes, canyons, mountains, and
oceans. Primitive people, no less than ourselves, felt the necessity
of explaining the earth and its features. They wanted to know what
caused earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, especially the things
that awed them and excited fear. Consequently, long before geol-
ogy was plated upon a mientific basis there floated about the ancient
world various explamatibhs of earth phenomena. Most of these ac-

HUTTON 47

counts were fragmentary, fanciful and legendary, while others, sur-
prisingly enough, contained a few facts.

One of the most pernicious types of errors in dealing with
theories is to read into ancient texts modern conceptions. As a
matter of historical analysis the ancients knew very little about
the structure of the earth. The Babylonians and the Jews con-
tributed nothing. Babylonia, a vast country of sand, showed very
little rock to interest its thinkers. The ancient Hebrews, on the
other hand, could make no progress in this direction because they
ascribed all natural phenomena to Yahweh, their god. Those mani-
festations of nature that were unfavorable to their happiness were
believed to be signs of the deity’s wrath. Of an earthquake they
declared that “Yahweh looketh on the earth and it trembleth,”
and they described a volcanic disaster by saying that “Yahweh rained
upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire out of heaven.”

Leaving the oriental world and coming to the Greeks and Ro-
mans we find a somewhat different story. As early as the fourth
century b.c. that old Greek traveler Herodotus (484-425 b.c.) noted
the occurrence of petrified shells in the Egyptian hills and con-
cluded from them that the ocean had once spread over that coun-
try. He could clearly see that the yearly deposit of silt laid down
by the Nile upon its wide flood plain made that country “the gift
of the river.” On one occasion he cautiously suggested that the
famous gorge of Tempe, which was attributed to the work of the
god Hercules, was not formed by that divine hero at all but rather
that “the mountain had been torn asunder by an earthquake.”

It took a long time for men to abandon the idea that earth
processes were governed by capricious and temperamental gods.
Here and there over the centuries we find a few daring thinkers
who challenged traditional views. That was the case of Aristotle
(384-322 B.c.) who advanced an intelligent appreciation of geo-
logical phenomena. Aristotle is the first individual of whom it
is recorded that he took notes and collected books with a view
to an encyclopaedic organization of existing knowledge. His insist-
ence was upon facts (not hearsay evidence) and he strongly urged ,
his followers “first to classify them, haying particular facts under
general heads and co-ordinate them into, theories.” It is no wonder
that Dante designated him “the master of them that know.’’

4.8 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Aristotle possessed the mind of scientific
genius. He represents the high watermark of scientific achieve-
ment of antiquity both in actual observations and in theoretical
speGulation. Aristotle gave much thought to the work done by
surface agencies of erosion in modifying the land. The changes
which the face of the earth undergoes were understood better by
him t han any of his predecessors and contemporaries. Some of the
things he said seem strangely modern. For example, “The sea now
covers tracts that were formerly dry land, and dry land will one
day reappear where we now find sea. We must look on these muta-
tions as following each other in a certain order and with a certain
periodicity.” After observing the rivers entering the Mediterranean
on the north, he gently ridiculed Plato for holding the belief that
rivers originate in a great subterranean reservoir within the earth.
Aristotle pointed out the fact that the large rivers flowing into the
Mediterranean rise in high, mountainous country; that mountains
condense the moisture in the atmosphere, absorb it, and subse-
quently discharge it into channels which grow into rivers. From
studying the Nile he observed that rivers deposit material on flood
plains and build up the land. (Each year the Nile deposits upon
its delta over fifty million tons of rock debris.)

Neither the ancient Greeks or Romans went very far in explain-
ing natural processes. Most of their contributions were fragmen-
tary, disconnected and interlarded with myth. The information they
had on rocks and minerals, earthquakes, floods, and volcanoes was
entangled in a texture of beliefs that matured in a prescientific age.
Take for example the subject of volcanoes. Because of the location
of Greece and Rome in a belt of frequent volcanic activity tire
ancients turned their thoughts to the contemplation of under-
ground forces. Unfortunately, their information was limited; they
knew but four or five volcanoes located in the Mediterranean area.
(Only in modern times has man come to know the existence of
scores of volcanoes scattered over almost every part of the earth.)
Not only were the ancients limited in their knowledge about vol-
canoes but most endeavors to investigate them closely were regarded
as acts of impiety. North of the northernmost tip of Sicily lies the

HUTTON

belching island of Vulcano which the ancients believed to be the
portal of the netherworld dominated by the furious god Vulcan
(from which we get the word, volcano). Yet such is the spirit of
progress that at the first recorded eruption of Vesuvius the elder
Pliny lost his life in an attempt to approach the mountain and
examine the action which was taking place there.

Despite much superstition and fear it must be admitted that
the ancients knew a few things based upon their common-sense
observation. Consider for example the writings of that fine old
Greek scholar Strabo who gave the world an intensely interesting
series of books on Geography (in seventeen volumes!) written
somewhere around the year 7 B.c.

Strabo was a man of independent financial means with equally
independent philosophical convictions. Like Hutton, who was to
follow him many centuries later, Strabo was a patient and pains-
taking examiner of theories— particularly those attempting to ex-
plain the origin of stratified rocks and fossil shells of sea creatures
embedded in them. After long and careful study he came to the
conclusion accepted by modem science that many regions, now
dry land, were once covered by ocean waters and that these same
areas may alternately rise and sink with reference to the sea level.
“Everyone will admit that at many periods a great portion of the
mainland has been covered and again left bare by the sea.”

Imagine what it meant in Strabo’s day to speak of the earth in
action— some portions of it moving up and others going down. From
time immemorial men have thought of the earth as solid, assuring
themselves that their feet were set firmly upon immovable ground.
Of course this was the simplest way of understanding the struc-
ture of earth. With Strabo we contemplate the beginnings of an-
other idea whose magnificent panorama will unfold itself before us,
demonstrating that not only does the earth spin on its axis and turn
about the sun, but that the earth itself and every feature of it is
constantly changing. The “everlasting hills” that the ancient He-
brews spoke about are not everlasting, the vast waters in the sea
are pulled by the sun and moon into tides; and the earth is con-
stantly changing its shape because there is action in it similar To
that in water. Indeed, the modern istory! oif geological evolution
is, in brief, the story of a succession of stages each of whi^

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

be conceived as heaving up accumulated deposits as land areas,
their gradual denudation, and the laying down o£ the formations
for the next geological stage.

On the side of theory Strabo is regarded as the father of modern
views of mountain-making. He also originated the hypothesis that
volcanic outbursts act as safety valves for the earth, releasing pent-up
subterranean vapors.

Following the destruction of ancient Greece and Rome those
long centuries known as the Dark Ages were productive of no in-
creased knowledge about the earth. In the books of the medievalists
such knowledge was relegated to a mere footnote. Yet throughout
these centuries we find here and there, scattered through theologi-
cal treatises, discussions about fire and water which were accepted
as the active and formative forces of earth. Their relative impor-
tance was the one great subject of debate; hence it was unavoidable
that the conceptions of the ancient philosophers should reappear
time and again in the theories of medieval thinkers. Unfortunately,
medieval Christendom did not use either ks eyes or its common
sense. Its supreme interest was theology, certainly not geology.

It is hard to get rid of old ways of thinking. It took Europe sev-
eral centuries to pass through the medieval cloud of intellectual
darkness. Slowly, very slowly, men began to investigate nature at
first hand. Soon there arose in almost every land of Europe a grow-
ing group of scientists who were patiently contributing new data
to the knowledge of chemistry, physics and the constitution of the
earth’s crust. These were the men who were beginning to see the
earth as a record of the operation of law; they were preparing the
only possible foundation for a science of geology.

That medieval prodigy of nature, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-
1519), deserves an honored place among these early pioneers as one
of the first who investigated the structure of the earth in an en-
deavor to know it in terms of scientific principles. By profession
an engineer. Da Vinci was also an artist, a musician, a sculptor and
a geologist, "Study science first,’’ said he, “then follow the practice
which is born of science.’’ Placing the earth on a scientific basis
has been a long-drawn-out job beginning with such men as Leonardo

HUTTON

and carried on in a piecemeal fashion up to our day. Every advance
has been of inestimable value.

Da Vinci understood the true origin of fossils. While construct-
ing canals in northern Italy, he cut through stratified rock (rocks
which lie in layers) and unearthed numerous shells, fossils of rlams ,
snails, crabs and other marine creatures. These he correctly inter-
preted as due to the submergence of the land beneath sea level,
thereby reviving the ancient Greek idea that stratified rocks were
old ocean floors. This scientific view was not in accord with medie-
val ecclesiastic thought which regarded fossils as evidence of Noah’s
Flood. It is incredible how long and with what tenacious force
so many unfounded geological beliefs persisted. When they began
to crumble all manner of strategy was invented to reconcile ancient
teachings with the scientific facts. The discovery of shells on the
Alps, for example, was hailed as confirming the reality of the Deluge
which was supposed to have covered all the high hills. Curious that
the diflSculty of washing shells up the mountainsides did not seem
any too serious a problem to the faithful.

By close observation in the north Italian valleys Leonardo came
to understand the agency of running water in sculpturing the
earth’s surface. No one up to his time had investigated so com-
petently or so thoroughly the laws relating to the movement of
water and hydraulics generally. He showed how rivers erode their
valleys, how they deposit pebbles on valley terraces; how a fine
detritus accumulates at river mouths, how plants and animals are
buried in it, how the organic remains then pass through physical
changes and become petrified while the river mud hardens into
solid rock, and finally how the rock containing the embedded fossils
rises above sea-level and becomes dry land.

The heritage left by Leonardo was not lost. Such is his magic
that once you know him you treasure ineffaceable memories of his
work. Great scientist that he was, he was also a great theorist an-
ticipating much that was discovered by those who followed him.
But advanced ideas, which he and his successors championed, did
not go unchallenged. In 1661 Thomas Burnet wrote his Sacred
Theory of the Earth; and in 1696 William Whiston published his
New Theory of the Earth, These fandhil books were typical of a
pious effort to discredit scientific thinking. Both authors concern

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

themselves with the Deluge, the wickedness of mankind and how
the biblical catastrophe affected the crust of the earth. According
to Whiston, Noah’s flood was caused on November i8, 2349 B.c.,
when the tail of a comet passed over the equator and caused a
downpour of rain!

It took an enormous amount of energy to roll aside the mass of
philosophical and doctrinal tradition that blocked the path of prog-
ress. Slowly, and by imperceptible degrees, the misinformation that
had deceived, perplexed and misled mankind began to crumble.

The close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
century was a period made memorable in geology by the pioneer
labors of a brilliant phalanx of scientific investigators. Basically,
these men felt there was a demand for new experience not simply
to achieve an extension of previously held concepts, but to create
a thorough-going fundamental revision. As a result of this attitude
their investigations and teachings stirred new activity throughout
Europe. Round them gathered a spirited group of young men
attracted both by the freshness of the new knowledge and above all
by enthusiasm for a science which had largely to be pursued out-of-
doors, offering wide scope for the physical as well as the mental
energies of youth.

The characteristic feature of this period, that which gives it
significance in the development of geology, was the determined
spirit to sift the facts, to seek untiringly new observations and
new truths both in the field and in the laboratories. The fascinating
subject of earth sculpture thus began in earnest. It was a form
of intoxication for these young men; out of this intoxication dis-
coveries were to bubble.

Interest was directed toward the investigation and description
of the accessible parts of the earth’s crust. The composition and
arrangement of the strata were now studied with enthusiasm. The
bolder and more venturesome inquirers beat their way into wild
recesses of mountain chains and climbed snowy peaks whose
difficulties had long been thought insurmountable. From many
countries travelers explored the uninhabited plains of Siberia, the
remote ; mountain ranges of distant Asia and the new Americas,
bringing home with theni fresh scientific material of the highest

HUTTON

importance. Much of their work is of a richness and variety that
baffle description.

By their unwearied efforts in collecting and identifying fossils
and rock specimens, no less than by their unabated zeal in the
laboratory, they established the young science of geology upon a
platform of equality with other spheres of scientific knowledge.
The time was now ripe for theory.

Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749-1817) was professor of miner-
alogy at Freiberg, Saxony. His unrivaled leadership in geology
was gained both from his eloquent skill as a teacher who possessed
great charm of manner and from the inspiration which he suc-
cessfully poured into his students. Werner came from an old estab-
lished family which had engaged in mining and metal working for
three hundred years. As a child he played with mineral specimens
which his father, an overseer of iron works, had given him. Small
in stature, he had a pug nose and a shy disposition, but he was a
brilliant and gifted speaker. For a man who bulks so large in the
development of science, Werner wrote surprisingly little. His repu-
tation was built almost entirely upon the spoken word which he
used with surpassing effect.

When he became professor at the Freiberg mining school, it
was a small job in an unimportant academy founded for the train-
ing of the local Saxon miners. Within a few years he raised his
post to world significance. Students flocked to Freiberg from every
quarter of the globe. Werner was unquestionably the most sought
after and popular teacher of the science of minerals and rocks.
By the power of his personality he came to be regarded as a kind
of scientific pope whose pronouncements were upheld as infallible.
His disciples were everywhere, and they were loud and blatant in
their Wernerian faith. As long as he lived, Freiberg remained the
acknowledged center for the study of the earth sciences.

What made Werner so interesting was his astonishing intercourse
with ideas. Other teachers of mineralogy were dry as dust, but
Werner knew how to make the subject attractive; he had a way'
of interrelating knowledge, keeping his classes spellbound with
this kind of magic. He was forever bringing together an endless

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

variety of apparently detached information and then ,

secrets which might well have seemed undiscoverable. The story
of minerals fed the flame of his soul because it was not the
story of nature but also because it was interwoven with _ history, ,

adventure, agriculture, mining, building, jewelry, love, inttigue,
man and woman. In each lecture he forged links between minerals
and almost everything under the sun. Out of such blendings o
information students acquired new insights. No wonder Wemei s

contemporary fame was tremendous. . . , ...

But if ever there was a dogmatic theorist intolerant of views
differing from his own, Werner was that man. For this reason his
influence in the field of geological theory proved disastrous. \et
his services to mineralogy were exceedingly great and are not to
be minimized because he erred so grievously elsewhere. When his
pupils left Freiberg, they went out into the world as fine mineiaio-
rists but also (and this is the unfortunate part) with the ardor of
missionaries to win proselytes to the Wernerian faith, “not patient y
to investigate nature but to apply everywhere the uncouth ter-
minology and hypothetical principles which he had taught them.

And great was the confusion thereof. , r i

Werner, whom his admirers loudly hailed as the father of mod-
ern geology, exhibited a curious admixture of characteristics. On
the one hand he was an enthusiastic collector of facts, but he saw
only those facts which seemed to confirm his speculations. In illus-
tration of his dogmatic method take, for example, his system of
rock formations. Before he had ever set foot out of Saxony he
taught that rock formations (as found in his own little corner of
Europe) were universal and that these strata could be recognized by
the same characteristics anywhere in the world. Accordingly, he
arranged the crust of the earth in a series of formations, describing
the variety of rocks, the details of their position and structure, theii
succession, as well as their economic value.

Like most other attempts to simplify complex problems, Wer-
ner’s chronological scheme succeeded in becoming ridiculous.
Werner was an untraveled man and what he did not see did not ,
bother him. His system of rock succession was simple because his
observations were restricted to the kingdom of Saxony, and if (as
in rhis case) there are no volcanoes in Saxony this merely meant

HUTTON

that volcanic action is utterly unimportant! He and his followers
constantly boasted that they accepted only facts and discarded all
theory. “Never in the history of science,” remarked Geikie the ge-
ologist, “did a stranger hallucination arise than that of Werner
and his school, when they supposed themselves to discard theory
and build on a foundation of accurately ascertained fact. Never was
a system devised in which theory was more rampant; theory, too,
unsupported by observation, and, as we now know, utterly errone-
ous. From the beginning to the end of Werner’s method and its
application, assumptions were made for which there was no ground
and these assumptions were treated as demonstrable facts.”

The Wernerian theory was a catastrophic view: it postulated
sudden changes in nature. Later on in this chapter we shall see
with what great skill James Hutton demolished this conception.
There are so many phenomena upon our globe which seem at first
sight to bear testimony to the action of sudden and catastrophic
forces that the tendency to account for all past changes by these
violent actions is easily understandable. However, what so often
seems to be true is not true at all. The sun, for example, seems to
rise in the east and set in the west: actually it does not and only
those whose views were founded upon imprecise data could be-
lieve that it did.

The advocates of the Wernerian doctrines were sometimes called
Neptunists (after Neptune, the mythological god of the ocean). All
existing rocks were believed to have been deposited from primeval
water— a chaotic fluid. One form of the theory had it that “the whole
earth was taken to pieces at one time and dissolved in an all-
embracing ocean,” after which layers of inorganic material were
deposited from this chaotic fluid as the water evaporated or receded.
This theory gave us what has been called an onion-coat earth, since
rock layers would be deposited all around the earth at once, the
layers eventually resembling the coats or skins of an onion.

Perhaps the greatest absurdity of the Wernerian doctrine was
this belief in a universal shoreless ocean out of whose hot and
fecund waters the substance of all the rock formations of the earth
had been precipitated. The French scientist Bu^on (1707-1788)

architects of ideas

had originally propounded the universal ocean theory o exp
the origin of fossils. Werner believed that the whole globe had
once been surrounded with an ocean of water at least as deep
as the mountains are high. How this primeval ocean couW have
held all the rocks in solution, and how the successive deposits were
caused to be precipitated, were never explained. ^

The earth, to Werner, showed universal strata like the layers of
an onion, the mountains being formed by erosion,^ subsidence,
cavings-in. He entirely ignored the evidence for crustal disturbance
and held the sorry belief that all sedimentary rocks had been laid
down in the positions they now occupy, whether horizontal or
inclined at an angle of sixty degrees. And because he was strong y
opposed to the acceptance of volcanic action as one of the chief
causes of geologic formation, he summarily dismissed the long and
careful researches of other men on the nature of vulcanism and
the origin of basalt. The interior of the earth, according to Wer-
ner’s Neptunist doctrines, was cold; and as he had no conception o
movement within the earth’s crust, he explained volcanoes naively
as burning beds of coal spontaneously ignited.

Men who utilize science are not necessarily those who are able
to advance it. Werner’s pupils went out into the world as able min-
eralogists but as poor theorists, and what was more harmful still,
unbelievably stubborn men and reactionary when confronted with
new facts. They denied the igneous origin of such rocks as basalt
even though other scientists proved that rocks of precisely similai
character had often been seen flowing in a melted state down the
sides of volcanoes. As enthusiastic Wernerians they spread far and
wide the ideas of their great but misguided master.

Take the case of Leopold von Buch (1774-1853)- Here was a
distinguished Wernerian student and one of the most illustiious
o-eologists Germany ever produced. He was one of a large group
who went forth to proselytize for the cult of Wernerianism. As a
loyal Neptunist, Von Buch proclaimed the orthodox beliefs of his
master regarding the aqueous origin of all rocks. However, his
faith received a rude jolt when he visited the old volcanic region
of central France and became convinced of the volcanic origin of

HUTTON

the basalt rock in that region. As a strict adherent of the cold-
earth theory he was loath to admit that what he had learned from
Werner was wrong; so while admitting the obvious volcanic nature
of the basalts in France, he stoutly remained loyal to the Wernerian
belief in the aqueous origin of the basalts in Saxony.

Not for long could he be lulled into fatal apathy by the nar-
cotic of Wernerianism; and not for long could he continue to be
in opposition to those who saw in vulcanism the important factor
in earth history. Von Buck’s emancipation from the fading dogmas
of Wernerian misinformation was slow; gradually hoxvever he came
over to the ranks of the Vulcanists. Logical ideas are keys which
are shaped in reference to opening a lock, and in Von Buck’s case
it was just a question of time until he held in his own hands the
right tool. This was impressively accomplished when he became
convinced that the higher mountains of Europe had never been
covered by the sea, as postulated by Werner, but had been elevated
by successive uplifts.

Frederick the Great once said that “the greatest and noblest
pleasure which we can have in this world is to discover new truths;
and the next is to shake off old prejudices.” Many Wernerian stu-
dents might be mentioned who were much slower than Von Buch
in altering their position on the absurd Neptunist doctrines (the
cold-earth theory) of Werner. In the history of science it is amaz-
ing how much valuable attention has been directed from the
observation of nature into barren controversy. The unforgivable
stubbornness of the Wernerians, an exhibition of an unfathomable
shallowness, prolonged the battle. But the time came when others,
like Von Buch, realized the importance of the internal heat of the
globe (the hot-earth theory) as the most powerful agency in shaping
tlie structure of our planet.

TA/liile the followers of Werner were blatantly and piously preach-
ing their Neptunist doctrines, already stiff with dogma, a modest
and unassuming Scotsman, gifted with practical inquisitiveness,
was sifting out new facts not understood by the crusaders from ;
Freiberg. This man was James Hutton Whose Theory of the Earth
has become a part of the unshakable basis of modern knowledge.

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

The original treatise, which made its appearance under that title
in a learned journal, is one of the finest classics in all geological
literature. It completely demolished the dogmas of Wernerianism.

Hutton, who was born in Edinburgh on June 3, 1726, was trained
in the schools of his native city. His strong bent for chemical science
induced him to select medicine as a profession. After studying at
Edinburgh, he went to Paris and then to Leyden where he took
his medical degree in September 1749. On his return to Scotland
he did not follow his profession: medicine was abandoned and
he took to agriculture, having inherited land in Berwickshire. He
began to study scientific husbandry, taking a practical interest in
his soils and water-courses. During years of highly successful farm-
ing Hutton introduced new methods while developing his knowl-
edge of geology. As soon as he had amassed a sizable fortune in a
chemical adventure (manufacture of sal ammoniac from coal-soot),
he felt free to devote all his time and energies to the pursuit of
science. In 1768 he leased his farm and with ample means moved
to Edinburgh.

From his earliest days Hutton had exposed his mind to nature’s
exhibitions, taking delight in studying the surface forms of the
earth and the rocks. He wanted to know how those Scottish rocks,
so gnarled and broken, had come into being. Scotland abounds in
many beautiful glens and valleys, mountains and seacoasts: How
were they created? Such a mind is magnetized— it finds everywhere
what it is seeking. During frequent journeys in England, Flanders,
in Holland and Wales, Hutton widened his geology.

With the passing of the years he became a skillful mineralogist,
for minerals suggested to him constant questions as to the earlier
geological condition of our planet. He brought together an amaz-
ing collection of rocks. Every fact in nature, no matter how insig-
nificant, became full of meaning; for even the insignificant is an
historical record, the revelation of a cause, the lurking place of a
principle. No amount of effort or detailed observation did Hutton
consider too much in order to establish his own careful examina-
tion. In the course of his wide studies he read whole libraries of
travel books in an effort to amass the most detailed information
concerning the earth and its features. By 1764 he was ready to
undertake an excursion through North Scotland; ten years later he

HUTTON

made a complete tour of Wales. Always pursuing an idea, Hutton
was at the same time always tracking a living active principle. Great
theorist that he was, he based every conclusion on observed fact-
as the subtitle of one of his books expresses it, to progress “from
sense to science.”

Essentially Hutton saw the earth not as a curiosity shop of de-
tached wonders, but as a cosmos. Behind the endless confusion of
detail he beheld a few great simple processes that have been going
on age after age. For the best part of his life he had pondered these
facts, tossed them about in his mind, tested them, and sought re-
peated confirmation before he began to fix them in written words.

On various rambles into the beautiful country around Edinburgh
he was often accompanied by interested friends. His observations,
many of them made during these little trips, on the effects of erosion
in producing the diversity of Scottish scenery have had a profound
influence on modern geology. Realizing the originality of his views
and his ability to epitomize them, his close friends begged him to
put them into written form. After long years of coaxing Hutton at
last set himself to the job, and in 1785 read his preliminary
paper on the Theory of the Earth before the Royal Society of Edin-
burgh. Ten years later he finished it.

The publication of his work in two volumes (the third was still
in manuscript when he died) attracted little favorable notice. This
has happened time and again in the history of science where a great
work, such as Kant’s Theory of the Heavens or Gregor Mendel’s
account of his discovery, fell flat. In Hutton’s case this was due to
several causes, partly to his unattractive style of writing, partly to
the title he used which rvas the same as that of so many valueless
publications, and also in a measure due to the originality of his
ideas; for tliey were so obviously contrary to those taught in the
schools and universities. In a word, Hutton’s theory was too un-
orthodox. It is the usual reaction of stereotyped minds when con-
fronted with a new' and upsetting thought to grow weary, so that
the tired intelligence, like a tired huntsman, yields to the ruses of
the quarry turns round, goes home content to think that the best
way to solve problems is not to solve them.

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Then again, to most people science means little more than an
increased command over the forces of nature. They pick up the
newspapers and read about this clever invention or that new marvel
and conclude that all science is represented by sensational triumphs.
They do not fully realize or comprehend the prime importance of
the scientific attitude of mind and often when they meet it they
frankly do not like it. Why? The reason the average man does not
wish other persons to think scientifically is that he does not wish
to think scientifically himself, the effort and the responsibility of
doing so being too great for him. In Hutton we find fully developed
the most precious possession of the human race: the scientific atti-
tude of mind, the primacy of those processes of thought that lead
to scientific achievement. Here are Hutton’s own words, a veteran
in the art of scientific thinking: “I do not seek to support an in-
sufficient theory with a precarious argument but would wish to have
every means employed by which truth might be made to appear.
It is in no way necessary that I should be right in this conjecture.
, . . Here are facts which are indisputable.”

How utterly different was this Huttonian point of view from the
theorizing mind of Werner! In many respects the thought-processes
of the German geologist remind one of Francis Bacon, author of
the Novum Organum and sometimes called the father of experi-
mental philosophy. It may be doubted whether Bacon ever merited
that title. (Certainly Werner did not merit being called the founder
of modern geology.) Bacon disregarded in his own works the very
principles of scientific investigation he so carefully expounded.
When he had collected so-called facts by the hundreds, he then pro-
ceeded to speculate upon them as if they were unalterable truths,
whereas in many cases they were merely old wives’ tales or hearsay
evidence. The best principles in the world will not help a theory
founded upon static data. So far did Bacon’s personal views mislead
him that he persistently rejected the Copernican theory, though
it formed the best possible example of his own scientific method
of procedure, of collecting data and observations and arriving at
conclusions from them. Mentally,. Werner was of the Baconian
stamp.

So many theorists in all ag'es have projected, their thinking on a

HUTTON

plane beyond the knowledge of their day. That was the fate of
Hutton whose views were half a century in advance of the recog-
nized geology of his contemporaries. So distinguished a thinker in
Edinburgh as Professor Robert Jameson (1774-1854), who held the
chair of Natural Philosophy, was a staunch advocate of Werner.
In 1808 he formed The Wernerian Natural History Society which
held its meetings in the museum of the University of Edinburgh.
With pointed reference to Hutton he once wrote: “We should
form a very false conception of the Wernerian doctrine were we
to believe it to have any resemblance to those monstrosities known
under the name of theories of earth. . . .” Jameson ultimately be-
came convinced of the truth of Hutton’s views, thus proving that
only slowly do professors learn a proper modesty and a proper un-
certainty.

The example of Doctor Jameson is cited to illustrate how Hut-
ton’s audience of geologists had to grow up. They were so com-
pletely trammeled by Wernerian beliefs that it took fully a genera-
tion for them to get their heads out of the sand. They had to learn
for themselves how to tap the fountain of science at its living
source. Was not this also proved by the case of Louis Agassiz?
Agassiz was the first to conceive and formulate the theory of a series
of great ice-caps spreading over a large part of the earth, remaining
thousands of years and bringing about an ice age. Fully thirty years
were required to enable other scientists to see the pictures in the
great geological past that he saw, but at last all saw them. No ge-
ologist now doubts that Agassiz was right.

The story of the great theorists of the world is often the story of
men at whom derision was hurled. Those who fought them did not
have their wisdom and subtlety of mind, or their charity of heart.
In 1793 Richard Kirwan, a Dublin mineralogist and president of
the Royal Irish Academy, attacked Hutton’s work in sharp and ig-
noble terms. (Kirwan was also a member of Doctor Jameson’s Wer-
nerian Natural History Society.) Advanced in years and convalesc-
ing from a severe illness, Hutton pulled himself together and reso-
lutely went to work, determined to answer Kirwan by revising his
treatise. Shortly after Kirwan’s paper had appeared in the Memoirs
of the Irish Academy, Hutton began his new job. Within less than
two years of intense effort he brought the whole of his subject mat-

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

ter under more skillful treatment. In 1795 revised work ap
peared in two octavo volumes.

Hutton’s original treatise is a memoir divided into four parts and
presented in ninety-six pages. The first two parts discuss the origin
of rocks. The facts of geology are so numerous that one is apt to
be overwhelmed by what seems to be an endless confusion of un-
related detail. Gradually one becomes aware of a few great but
relatively simple processes. The same processes which are taking
place today are just those processes which took place in eons gone
by. Hutton’s primary insistence is, “What is happening now, hap-
pened in the past.” In other words, the events of past geologic ages
can be most satisfactorily explained from a careful examination of
present conditions.

What is happening now?

Simply put: two forces are at work, the same forces that always
have been and always will be at work, (a) decay and (b) repair—
both operating over immeasurable periods of time.

Decay. The surface of the earth is constantly suffering disintegra-
tion and removal. The rate of decay may vary from place to place,
but essentially all mountains, rock, and soil are disintegrating and
being removed into the seas by the slow effects of atmospheric
weathering, chemical decomposition and the mechanical action of
water. Rivulets and rivers have constructed and are now construct-
ing their own valley systems. These flowing waters transport the
worn material of the land to the ocean upon whose bottom the de-
posits slowly accumulate to form rock-strata. In the removal of this
debris mountains are carved out and valleys formed.

Repair. The accumulated debris of the land carried to the sea
is there spread out on the floor of the ocean to form new strata.
The accessible parts of the earth’s crust composed of sandstones,
conglomerates, shales, and limestones are disposed in layers very
similar to the layers now accumulating in all lakes, seas, and oceans.
Thus the great rocks which constitute the visible part of the earth
were formed under sea just as sand, gravel and mud are laid down
there now. The renovation of the earth springs Phoenix-like out
of its decay— indeed, this decay would prove fatal were not the earth

HUTTON

a renewable organism in which repair is correlative with waste.

Hutton studied the globe as a machine adapted to a certain end,
namely, to provide a habitable world for plants, for animals, and,
above all, for intellectual beings capable of the contemplation and
the appreciation of order and harmony. While the earth is a ma-
chine it is more than a mechanism; it is an organism that repairs
and restores itself in perpetuity. This view destroys the static con-
ception of the earth: the idea that its existing condition is the fin-
ished product of forces no longer in action. To Hutton the earth
is not something done but something endlessly doing. Under his
guidance we see the long and stately panorama unfold-mountains
rise and disappear, sea and land repeatedly change places. In this
manner he explained the vast work of decay and repair (dissolu-
tion and restoration) and brought them together as a general prin-
ciple, even as Newton brought together a mass of details under the
single law of gravitation.

Hutton s theory can be made very plain and simple by drawing
a parallel between the cyclical forces that play upon rain and the
cyclical forces that play upon soil. Let us first look at rain. The
rain descends on the earth, streams and rivers bear it to the sea;
the aqueous vapors, drawn from the sea, supply the clouds, and the
circuit is complete. Similarly, the soil is formed from the mountains;
it is then washed as sediment into the sea by the action of running
water; geologic forces elevate it after consolidation, into mountains.
What is this powerful agency that converts the loose deposits into
solid rock, and elevates the consolidated sediments above the level
of the sea to form new islands and continents?

According to Hutton, this agency could only have been heat;
certainly not water, as Werner and his school believed, since the
cement material, such as quartz, feldspar, fluorspar, is not readily
soluble in water and could scarcely have been provided by water.
Because most solid rocks are intermingled with other material,
which may be melted under the influence of heat, Hutton suggested
that at a certain depth the sedimentary deposits are actually melted
by the tremendous weight of the superincumbent water. This
weight causes the mineral elements to consolidate once more into
coherent rock-masses.

Hutton believed that sedimentaiy rocks found high above the

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

present ocean level had been lifted by upheaval, and not, as the
Wernerians insisted, deposited from a universal ocean.

In the third part of his treatise he shows that the present land-
areas are composed of rock-strata which were laid down and con-
solidated during the past ages in the bottom of the ocean. These,
he said, have been pushed upward by the expansive force of heat,
while other rocks have been bent and tilted during the upheaval.
All strata are sedimentary, consolidated in the bed of the sea by
the pressure of the water and by subterranean heat. How are strata
raised from the depths of the ocean? By the same subterranean force
that helped consolidate them. The power of heat for the expansion
of bodies is, says Hutton (possibly having in mind the steam en-
gine), so far as we know, unlimited.

Werner believed volcanoes were only transitory and very recent
affairs caused by the spontaneous combustion of coal beds. Hutton
denied this. To him volcanoes were due to the interior heat of the
earth and inseparably connected with movements of liquid rock.
Because of the “cold-earth” theory Werner was misled into believ-
ing that granite owed its origin to water. Hutton showed that the
very opposite was true: granite was formed by the agency of ter-
rific heat. Essentially, Hutton said, “Volcanoes are safety valves”
affording exit for the molten rock and superheated vapors, thereby
preventing the expansive forces from raising the continents too far.

The evidences of volcanic eruption in the older geological epochs
are next discussed. Hutton expresses the opinion that during the
earlier eruptions the molten rock material spread out between the
accumulated sediments or filled crust-fissures, but did not actually
escape at the surface; consequently, that the older magmas had
solidified at great depths in the crust and under enormous pressure
of superincumbent rocks.

In the fourth part, Hutton concentrates attention on the pre-
existence of older continents and islands from which the materials
composing land areas of today must have been derived. Present
continents are composed from the waste of more ancient lands. This
means that the continents and islands of future eons will be made
up of materials obtained from land areas now existing. All present
rocks are without exception going to decay and their materials de-
scending into the ocean, Once in the ocean these loose materials are

HUTTON 65

converted into stone and later elevated into land. Heat is the agency
that consolidates these loose sands into rock.

In this fourth part Hutton also discusses the evidences of pre-
existing animals from which existing animals must have sprung.
Very logically he argues that the existence of ancient animal life
assumes an abundant vegetation. Of course, direct evidence of ex-
tinct floras is presented in the coal and bituminous deposits of the
Carboniferous and other epochs. Other evidence is afforded in the
trunks of trees that are found in marine deposits and have clearly
been swept into the sea from adjacent lands.

The treatise concludes with a strong emphasis upon the time
factor, the vastness of the geological eons necessary to accomplish
this “system of decay and renovation.” From a geological standpoint
time is “a thing of indefinite duration.”

No one before Hutton had demonstrated so effectively and con-
clusively that geology had to reckon with immeasurably long epochs,
and that natural forces which may appear small can, if they act
during vast periods of time, produce effects just as great as those
that result from sudden catastrophes of short duration. In fact, the
conception of sudden and great catastrophes advocated by Werner
and his followers was abandoned in favor of inexorable nature
working little by little, by the raindrop, by the stream, by insidious
decay, by slow waste, and eventually accomplishing surface trans-
formations on a scale more gigantic than was ever imagined by the
older geologists. Even so-called catastrophic changes, such as are
associated with the sudden action of earthquakes, volcanoes and
landslides, represent the end of a long and gradual process.

As Newton had widened man’s conception of space, so Hutton
enlarged his conception of time. Countless ages were required to
form mountains, rocks and the soil of our continents and islands,*
but “time, which measures everything in our idea, and is often
deficient to our schemes, is to nature endless and as nothing.”

This subject of time is one of the most important factors in the
history of science and scientific theory. When the astronomer
Cassini in 1672 gave proof that the sun was nearly a hundred mil-
lion miles away from earth people at first regarded, the figures as

ARCHITECTS GF IDEAS

too shocking. Similarly it required courage to claim that the geo-
logical record proved the earth to be older than the seven thousand
years which theologians deduced from the Bible. Because time is
harder to measure than space our indebtedness to the insight and
originality of Hutton is great. It is not too much to say that his in-
sistence on vast eons as the true geological time-scale had a far-
reaching influence on all branches of science; for time plays a tre-
mendous role in the architecture of modern thought. Given im-
measurable periods in which to work, nature not only changes all
things inorganic but also (as Darwin was to show) all things organic.
Since Hutton’s day evidences for the geological time-scale have been
greatly developed. The following ages for the various strata of earth
are now given as the best estimates:

MillionBM.

Eocene (Oregon coal seams, Alabama limestone, etc.). 6o

Carboniferous (Pennsylvania coal) 260-300

Upper Pre-Cambrian (Lavas along Lake Superior). ...... .560

Oldest known rock. .more than 1500

(B.M. Means Before Man)

Hutton did not undertake to explain the origin of things. He
conjured up no hypothetical causes, no catastrophes, or sudden con-
vulsions of nature; neither did he (as Werner did) believe that
phenomena now present were once absent. He undertook to ex-
plain all geological change by processes in action now as heretofore.
“In interpreting nature,” so he presents his argument, “no powers
are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to
be admitted of except those of which we know the principle, and
no extraordinary events to be alleged in order to explain a common
appearance.”

The guiding rule of Hutton’s theory is that the present condi-
tion of the earth is due to processes which we can see in operation
and that these same processes have been in operation as far back
as the earth’s history is legible^ Past events in the history of the
earth must be interpreted in the light of what is happening today.
He believed that the present alone would unlock the secrets of the
eons long ago, and for that reason he looked directly to the earth
for a solution of the problems of its history. Throughout his life

HUTTON

he maintained the true scientific attitude— an open mind for all
unsolved problems. Unlike Werner he did not attempt to har-
monize facts of nature with preconceived beliefs. Facts known to
everyone often have to wait hundreds of years before their true
significance is understood. Although many facts expressed in Hut-
ton’s famous treatise were known, he was unquestionably the first
man to paint the picture of the earth’s history as a logical connected
whole.

The gospel of a theory is true as long as it is “according to fact.”
In all of Hutton’s thinking the inductive method of reasoning is
used. He made the earth tell its own story wherein the facts hang
together and the parts interlock. He saw correctly that the earth
had not always worn its present aspect; that it had passed through
a long history of varied changes; that earth movements came at
different times; that from a study of the rocks themselves a con-
secutive story of the globe could be told. He saw the balance which
exists between erosion and deposition: that just as an old land sur-
face is worn away the materials for a new continent are being pro-
vided; that deposits rise anew from the bed of the ocean, and am
other land replaces tlie old in the eternal economy of nature. The
summary of Hutton’s argument is expressed in the closing words
of his treatise that “we find no vestige of a beginning— no prospect
of an end.”

When we compare Hutton’s theory of the earth’s structure with
that of Werner and other contemporary or older writers, the great
feature which distinguishes it and marks its superiority is the strict
inductive method applied throughout. Every conclusion is based
upon observed data that are carefully enumerated, no supernatural
or unknown forces are resorted to, and the events and changes of
past epochs are explained from analogy with the phenomena of the
present age-

Hutton was more than a geologist; he was a philosopher who
believed that all activities that make humanity what it is and sug- .
gest, with blended hope and despair, what it might become, are
inexorably geared to the earth. To this tinassutoing citizen of Edin-
burgh knowledge of man’s relationship to earth is the first requisite
of a philosophy of man. There was in hini the passion to induce ;

68 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

others who had acquired scientific knowledge to use their talents
in promoting a general understanding of the constitution of the
universe. These thoughts he elaborates in An Investigation of the
Principles of Knowledge and the Progress of Reason from Sense
to Science in Philosophy (3 volumes quarto).

Like other theorists in the line of thinkers who dominate these
pages, Hutton was the author of more than one important general-
ization. Besides projecting his theory of the earth, he was author
of the Theory of Rain, a paper he read before the Edinburgh So-
ciety on February 2, 1784, and subsequently published as Part I of
a rather large book entitled Dissertations on Different Subjects in
Natural Philosophy which appeared in 1792. Not only did he give
to the scientific world two original theories of his own, but he de-
voted his insight, imagination, philosophical spaciousness, and scien-
tific acumen towards the understanding of the theories of other
men. Half an hour spent in thumbing the pages of the Dissertations
reveals a mind that was a veritable intellectual mountain range.
In this unique book Hutton passes in review the important theories
of his day on fire, heat, light, gravitation, electricity. He subjects
each theory to a probing analysis in a driving endeavor to see the
unseen; each fluid hypothesis invites his investigation. “Man,” he
once wrote, “is not satisfied like the brute in seeing things which
are; he seeks to know how things have been, and what they are to
be.” The pages of the Dissertations usher us into the presence of
an alert theoretical mind possessed of an appetized intelligence, the
inquisitive spirit which notices whatever is unusual and sees a prob-
lem in every commonplace occurrence.

A happy personality won for Hutton a long life of usefulness in
the pursuit of the higher reaches of the human spirit. Besides the
philosopher and scientist there was something of the poet in him.
Not that he ever wrote any verses, but to his unsleeping mind na-
ture everywhere walked clothed in grandeur and glory. Charles
Kingsley, in that delightful book. Wonders of the Shore, spoke about
the naturalist in words most applicable to Hutton. “Happy truly
is the naturalist. He has no time for melancholy dreams. The earth
becomes to him transparent; everywhere he sees significances, har-
monies, laws, chains of cause and effect endlessly interlinked.”

His early delight in studying the rocks and the surface features

HUTTON

of the earth brought Hutton into the open where he saw in the
ways of the simplest things the great processes of the universe. Dur-
ing his memorable visit to Glen Tilt we are told that when he found
a number of granite-veins in a river bed “the sight of objects which
verified at once so many important conclusions in his system, filled
him with delight; and as his feelings on such occasions were always
strongly expressed, the guides who accompanied him were con-
vinced that it must be nothing less than the display of a vein of
silver or gold that could call forth such strong marks of joy and
exaltation.” As one comes to know Hutton one cannot escape ac-
cepting the broad philosophical quest that is in evidence in every
sentence Hutton wrote and is etched in invisible words underneath
every printed line in his books. Simply put: through man’s search-
ing of the earth, into the depths of the seas and the farthest reaches
of the heavens, he has been given a better understanding of his own
stature.

Hutton’s vast learning brought him into close relationship with
the leading scientists and thinkers of his day. There was Doctor
Joseph Black, author of the Theory of Latent Heat, to whom
Hutton dedicated his fine volume of Dissertations; there were Sir
James Hall, Lord Karnes, Watt, Adam Smith of laissez faire fame
and others. Of particular importance to us and to the world at
large -was John Playfair who did for Hutton what Huxley did for
Charles Darwin: he popularized the master.

Shortly after Hutton’s death Professor Playfair assumed the task
of explaining to the world the compelling originality and greatness
of the Edinburgh geologist. After five years of consummate effort
Playfair gave to science a book that discussed, explained and illus-
trated Hutton’s beliefs better than Hutton himself could have done.
Published in 1802 under the title Illustrations of the Huttonian
Theory, it at once opened the eyes of scientific men, for it was writ-
ten in clear and elegant manner and brought into prominence many
subjects which had received too brief or too subordinate a treat-
ment in Hutton’s own writings. So clear and understandable was
Playfair’s Illustrations that it came to be recognized as a model, for
the author “possessed the art of facilitating to others the attainment
of that knowledge which he had himself acquired by profound

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Although Hutton dealt with no cosmogony, it became increas-
ingly more evident, from the day he published his Theory of the
Earth) that our planet is bound by ties of the closest resemblance
to other members of that family of worlds to which it belongs, and
that the materials entering into their constitution and the forces
operating in all are the same. Other theorists of later date, com-
bining the knowledge of geology and astronomy, have given us
plausible explanations of the origin of the earth as a member of a
planetary system. We will see this in the chapter on Thomas C.
Chamberlin. For himself Hutton avoided this vaster cosmic specu-
lation, and rightly so. For he felt that the time was not ripe to
formulate a seasoned theory on the origin of the planetary system.
For this reason Hutton wisely felt it to be his duty to ascertain
what evidence there is in the earth itself that will throw light upon
the history of the planet.

Some of Hutton’s views have been changed in detail by the prog-
ress of science, many have been greatly elaborated and some few
ideas completely discarded; but in the main the essential features
of his theory have stood foursquare to all the winds that blow. It
must be remembered that in Hutton’s time physics and chemistry,
as we now know these two sciences, were in an undeveloped state.
Consequently several errors arose in connection with the origin
of minerals and rocks which had to be corrected.

No geologist would now agree with the principle that heat has
hardened and partially melted all sedimentary rocks, and just as
little would he ascribe to heat the origin of flint, agate or silicified
wood. On the other hand, the hypothesis known as regional meta-
morphism is an extension of Hutton’s conception of the action of
heat and pressure upon rocks. MetaiUorphic rock is rock that has
undergone an intense alteration of its original structure. Such
changes are produced by heat, pressure and earth movements, so
that it is often difficult to decide the precise origin of the rock.
Consequently it is convenient to class all such doubtful cases as
metamorphic. Limestone, for example, subjected to heat under great
pressure, crystallizes and forms marble.

Hutton had never been attracted by the possibilities of experi-
ment: he believed that the processes of nature are too complicated

HUTTON '71

and on too large a scale to be successfully imitated in the laboratory.
It took no little ingenuity and daring to attempt experiments on
heating under pressure in order to produce alteration of rock. This
bold adventure was undertaken by Sir James Hall (1761-1831),
who succeeded in producing crystalline rocks from an igneous melt
in his laboratory. With one titan blow he rudely shattered Wer-
ner’s ideas that crystalline rocks in all cases had been precipitated
from sea water. The experiments on rocks initiated by Hall and
carried out over a period of thirty-five years were subsequently
confirmed by others who followed him. These results completely
overthrew Wernerian ideas and incontestably substantiated Hut-
tonian principles.

In the winter of 1796 the illness that had plagued Hutton in
1793 returned. He was now in his seventieth year and physically
feeble. The devotion of his sister Isabella (Hutton never married)
carried him through that Christmas and on into the next year.
Always active in mind, he now began to prepare a book entitled
Elements of Agriculture. He did not live to finish it for he died
in March.

An incredible quantity of manuscript and notes was left behind.
Hutton was an indefatigable writer quite in contrast to Werner
who disliked anything connected- with pen and paper, going so
far, as Cuvier relates, to leave unopened and unanswered a letter
inviting him to become a member of a learned society.

A portrait of Hutton by Raeburn shows a slender figure with
a high forehead, a thin face and a somewhat aquiline nose. The
friends of Hutton throughout the world are thankful for this
remembrance of the man. But even if this Raeburn portrait were
lacking, there is another picture, far more important, that has come
down to us in a short but very beautiful memoir on his life writ-
ten by Professor Playfair. In it he eulogized his friend’s great
theoretical talents in these words: “The experienced eye, the power
of perceiving the minute differences and fine analogies which dis-
criminate or unite the objects of science, and the readiness of com-
paring new phenomena with others already treasured up in the
mind; these are accomplishments which no rules can teach.”

Summing up the work of the theorist from Edinburgh, we may
justly say that, as Copernicus opened the new heavens, so James
Hutton revealed the new earth.

3. Dalton

. THE THEORY OF THE
STRUCTURE OF MATTER

ALL early explanations of nature are the work of the imagination.
They are guesses, for man is a creature constantly given to prema-
ture decisions on inadequate grounds. To get rid of all guesses,
which belong to the infancy of mankind, and to arrive at the facts
is the work of science. In each case some time-honored gigantic
conception, like another traditional Goliath, had to be felled by
small bits of knowledge.

In dealing with theories it is often difficult to trace the varying
phases of their early development from indistinct glimmerings of
long ago to the heights of some great effulgence in the mind of a
genius-theorist. Yet we have before us just such a task in our attempt
to understand the atomic theory, for we must properly begin with
nothing more than primitive man’s simple sense of wonder: he
wanted to know what things are made of. Out of this elementary
desire has come our vast modern knowledge of the structure of
matter.

Early man had already shown himself upon the earth as a ques-
tioning animal, never satisfied and constantly outstripping himself.
In all ages he has been a creature en route to a theory. “He does
not form a closed system of needs and gratifications for his needs,”
once wrote Paul Valery. “Hardly are his body and his appetites
appeased when something stirs within him; it torments him, in
forms him, commands him, goads him on; it directs him secretly.
And that something is the mind; the mind armed with all its inex-
haustible questions.”

So often in tracing the origins of early pre-scientific ideas we are
forced to gaze back through indefinite vistas of time to the dim
outlines of forgotten civilMtibns. Like the countless generations

DALTON

o£ nien who preceded them, the ancient Greeks saw at first hand
the e^rth, the air, water and fire. Everything seemed to grow out
of these four basic things, and in the fullness of time return again
unto them. This simple observation, which may be referred back to
an almost universal primitive mode of thinking, led to the thought
that all matter, the visible universe, is made up of four elements.

In its simplest terms the theory of the four elements stated that
in this changing world of ours there were four substances that never
changed— earth, air, water and fire. These four units make up all
the varieties of matter; from their elemental nature all the com-
plex forms that fill the earth have been spun. Everything which
man sees with his eyes, touches with his hands or weighs in his
scales must share the qualities of these four changeless things.

Oftentimes the origin of a word gives remarkable insight into
old thought-processes. Element comes from elementum of obscure
origin, which in all probability means “to nourish.” Apparently
the substances that the ancients called elements were believed to
be those basic but mysterious things from which the universe was
composed and from which all other things derived.

A typical proof that the four elements consist of fire, air, earth
and water lay in pointing out the fact that when a piece of wood
is burnt (a) fire appears, (b) xvater boils and hisses from the ends
of the burning wood, (c) smoke ascends into the air, where it van-
ishes, thus proving that it is of the same nature as the air, and (d)
an earthly ash is left.

All theories have a life-history; they are born, they live and very
fortunately the vast majority die young. The mortality rate among
them is high, and that is as it should be. It is only too sad that
some live on for centuries only to block the path to progress. The
theory of the four elements enjoyed an enormously long span
of acceptance largely because it was backed by the prestige of Aris-
totle. “To go beyond Aristotle by the light of Aristotle is to think
that a borrowed light can increase the original light from which

Almost coincidently with the collapse of the classical world of
Greece and Rome the theory of the four eleraents entered medieval
thinking where it held undisputed sway over the minds of sue-

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

ceeding generations; it became the main theoretical idea of the
age of alchemy which arose out of the ruins of the antique world
of thought. As the master-concept, the four elements ruled proudly
for fifteen hundred years until decay set in and it gradually disap-
peared.

From a theoretical standpoint the long centuries of alchemy
were extraordinarily static; they contributed nothing toward a
better understanding of the intricate structure of matter. For the
most part the learned scholars, doctors and philosophers just talked
into their beards. The person who is brave enough to read their
discussions is bound to appreciate the caustic w'ords of Omar
Khayyam—

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door as in I went.

But one need not belittle or ridicule an age simply because its
ideas are now regarded as erroneous and archaic. To understand
them even in part leads to an appreciation of the continuity of
man’s intellectual effort. Once the distinguished French scholar
Bouche-Leclercq, after he had made an exhaustive study of astrol-
ogy in relation to the thought of antiquity, declared that it was
not a waste of time to find out how other people have wasted theirs.

The alchemists from the third to the fifteenth century were men
who spun out a vast amount of belief; their books abound in ref-
erences to the four elements, the sulphur-mercury doctrine, the
theory of transmutation of metals, the mystical notions of the Phi-
losopher’s Stone (often called the elixir of life) and scores of other
ideas full of theology, mythology, magic, astrology and the like. But
such thinking was not only unproductive of results in the realm of
theory, it was equally unproductive in the field of experimental
knowledge. If anything, alchemical theory deteriorated rather
than advanced, for it was heavily encrusted with mysticism and
obscurantism.

What finally brought the long reign of alchemy to an end was
science and the growing spirit of science which refused to be
swayed by false methods of reasoning. The alchemists, having a

DALTON ■ .. . 75

preconceived idea of how things should be,, made all their experi-
ments to prove their theories. When in 1661 the English scientist'
Robert Boyle introduced the modern idea of the elements, he
reversed this attitude of mind, and with this transition from one'
point of view to an exactly opposite one the great citadel of alchemy
began to crumble.

In brief, this is how it happened:

In his General History of the Air Robert Boyle (1627-1691) gave
his views on how he thought the atmosphere might be composed.
Although his explanation was somewhat crude, it had the eiEfect
of demolishing the old notion. For Boyle showed that air was not
an element but a mixture of gases and not a simple one at that.

What Bbyle did for air, Henry Cavendish (1731-1810) did for
water. In 1784 Cavendish announced his discovery of the composi-
tion of water. Far from, being a simple element as advocated by
the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Hebrews and the Greeks, Cavendish
showed that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen.

For a long time, of course, it was known that the earth too was
not a simple element because metals such as silver, iron, copper,
gold and the like could be extracted from it. As greater knowledge
poured in from a diverse group of investigators the earth came to
be understood as the most complex of the so-called four elements,
inasmuch as the earth can be separated into many chemical com-
pounds whose natures vary according to the locality from which
the soil or rock has been taken.

When it came to fire however a long and bitter controversy had
to be waged before it yielded its medieval ghost. Although fire is
a most important, if not the foremost, chemical process, still no one
in ancient or medieval times understood it or was able to explain it.
It continued a deep and impenetrable mystery. Not until the eight-
eenth century was the crude semi-alchemical theory about fire (called
the theory of phlogiston) completely overthrown. It remained for
Antoine Lavoisier (1 743“ 1794)? that prince of chemists, whose need-
less execution x^emains a deep blot on the French Revolution, to ac-
complish this feat when he showed that fire in and of itself is not
a material substance. Combustion, Lavoisier showed, involves an' in-
teraction of the combustible material with oxygen; and the rate of
combustion is influenced by the rate at which oxygen is supplied.

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

To Lavoisier we owe the word oxygen; and his alone is the honor of

explaining the known facts of combustion.

With the total destruction of the main theory of alchemy, earth,
air, water and fire came to be known as the defunct elements. With
their demise there also went into the discard the idea that each of
the four substances had a guardian spirit. Gone now were the sylphs
that were supposed to live up in the air, the undines that lived in
the water, the gnomes down under the earth and the salamanders
that inhabited fire.*

It was unquestionably impious on the part of science to rob
people of these semi-religious fancies. Science of course is unyielding,
and for this reason alchemy today, with all its vast theology, is noth-
ing more than a dim and spectral region. However, if one needs to
seek comfort at the wholesale destruction of old ideas perhaps the
words of Ernest Renan are the most satisfying: “The truths which
science reveals always surpass the dreams which it destroys.”

Besides their speculations on the elements the Greeks also won-
dered whether matter could be divided indefinitely. That is, if you
took a quantity of some substance and then took half of it, and
half of that again and again half of that, would you ever arrive
at anything that could not be divided? On this question they gave
two answers. Yes and No. Those thinkers who said “No” believed
that matter is continuous, filling all space with different degrees
of density. If matter be continuous, so they argued, then all matter
is infinitely divisible.

Those thinkers who said “Yes” believed matter to be porous,
made up of separate particles, entities in themselves and in some
fashion merged together in sufficient number to make up all physi-
cal bodies. What we see about us as an apparently solid and non-
porous object is in reality composed of discrete particles. These
particles they considered to be ultimate units— the building stones

* “Spirits of wine,” “spirits of ammonia,” “spirits of salt” remind us of these
old medieval conceptions. The properties of all substances were supposed to be
due to the "spirits” residing in them. Cobalt, for example, is derived from a
word meaning goblin which was believed to haunt underground places such as
mines and caves. Nickel comes from a word meaning demon.

DALTON 77

of matter and as such they were regarded as indivisible, indestructi-
ble and eternal.

Modern science has followed along the lines of those who made
the assumption that matter is the sum of its many indivisible par-
ticles. But it was not until after centuries of argument, experiment
and intellectual growth that the scientific mind formulated the
correct picture of the atomic structure of matter. John Dalton was
the first man to penetrate scientifically into the inmost recesses
of matter and to emerge wdth a broad and magnificent conception
of its interior state.

When the Greek philosophers conjured up the concept of the
atom as an imaginary entity, they did not even remotely realize
that these particles of matter belonged to a world of bewildering
complexity. The idea of atomic structure remained an interesting
curiosity until Dalton. But no more than that. Not only is Dalton’s
basic theory and viewpoint different, but the underlying factual
content is too. Even where it is said that the atomic idea is as old
as the Greeks, it must be remembered that Dalton introduced
accuracy where there had been vagueness; from an interesting in-
tellectual speculation Dalton’s genius produced an exact scientific
theory capable of experimental verification. The Greeks were long
on speculation but short on experimentation. That is why Aris-
totle had such a strong hold on medieval scholars; they could argue
endlessly on the subjects he provided! In those days it was not
necessary to prove anything by an appeal to experiment; one had
only to use “logic” and such canons of doctrinal teaching as had
been “revealed” to the saints. It was nothing less than a revolution
in the processes of thought when Roger Bacon (1214-1294) adopted
the motto: sine experienta nihil sufficienter sciri potest
(“There is no certain way of arriving at any competent knowl-
edge except by experiment.”).

This newly found experimental way of thinking became the
most significant part of the intellectual equipment of an illustrious
scientist, Robert Boyle, bom in Lismore Castle, Ireland, the four-
teenth child of the Earl of Cork, Because his thinking is a vital

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

link in the story of the atomic theory, a brief survey of his contribu-
tion must be interpolated here.

Boyle is worth remembering: the long age of alchemy virtually
ended with his introduction of the modern chemical idea of an
element. Unlike the alchemists, he did not use long Latin phrases,
nor was he limited by their fears, superstitions, taboos, or cumber-
some words. Alchemists wrote with an intentionally obscure ter-
minology. Boyle presented his ideas in simple English. In the inter-
ests of secrecy these older savants recorded their results in a mass
of mystic symbols. But with Boyle clarity, not befuddlement, was
the chief aim.

With sufficient means always at hand Boyle pursued science
without financial obstacles. Even as a lad he had had splendid
advantages and encouragement, among them a grand tour of the
European Continent in the company of a tutor. At the time he
visited Florence, Boyle was only fourteen years old, yet the wide-
awake youngster was sufficiently advanced to have been influenced
by the work of the great Galileo.

Upon his return to England we find him, many years later,
living at Oxford where he carried on extensive experiments. His
activities touched almost all branches of chemistry, anticipatory of
great achievements a century later. Out of his numerous experi-
ments on air came the beginnings of new knowledge on that subject
as well as his famous improved air pump which is still exhibited in
London in the rooms of the Royal Society for the Improvement
of Natural Knowledge of which he was one of the most active
originators.

An extraordinarily gifted and painstaking observer, Boyle did
not advance any definite chemical theory; indeed, there were in his
time not sufficient well-established data to warrant him in pro-
jecting one. Yet we owe to Boyle the use of the term “analysis” in
the modem chemical sense. He was the first to use it, and the word
has since carried with it Boyle’s profound approach to problems.
Though he lacked a theory, the demands of analysis led him to
ask the following question:

What is the world made of?

. , Boyle answered this question very simply and right to the point.
For in the questions he asked and the answers he gave, he showed

DALTON

an intuition so well described by one who said, “He smells the
truth.” Boyle’s answer was that if you pulled anything to pieces
and dissected it down to the last limits you would find that it was
made of one or more elements, and that when you got down to
these elements they always stayed the same and never changed
into anything else. To illustrate this point, take for example com-
mon salt. Salt is a compound which can be broken up into two
constituent elements. If you were to heat it very highly it would
split into sodium and chlorine.

Let us take another example, one from Boyle’s own writings;
we shall then realize how great a strain he laid upon simple and
direct thinking when he stated that two substances (mercury and
sulphur) are present in red mineral cinnabar. Cinnabar consists of
them just as a house consists of bricks and wood, or a piece of cloth
of different threads. This seemed extremely paradoxical because
one does not actually see mercury and sulphur when one looks at
red mineral cinnabar any more than one sees oxygen and hydro-
gen when one looks at water.

Not content with stating these facts, Boyle endeavored to un-
derstand them. Man, in order to be the observer, must see not
only what happens but why it happens. This Boyle did. He saw
with marvelous clarity that there is a difference between elemental
substances and compound ones. Why is red mineral cinnabar a
compound and not an element? Because it can be broken up. You
can see Boyle did not have in mind the so-called elements of the
Greek thinkers, earth, air, water and fire. He had in mind the
more numerous distinct substances of modern chemistry, such as
sulphur, copper, mercury, lead and gold, which we call elements
today. Boyle’s definition of an element was practical; instead of
postulating any definite number of elements he was content to
investigate the subject experimentally and so to find out how many
there actually are. Twentieth century chemistry lists more than
ninety of these elements. In Boyle’s day the embryo science of
chemistry knew less than two dozen. Yet Boyle’s definition of an
element as a “substance incapable of decomposition” has come down ,
to our day unchanged. By the precision of this luminous idea he
made chemistry a new science. Consequently there was inaugurated ,
an exact era enlightened by truth and free from fundamental errors. ,

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

In that massive chain that forges the cable of knowledge from
one age to another, it is important not to forget that Boyle was an
atomist. Steeped in the granular views of various philosophers, Boyle
championed the thought that all elements are made up of little
particles of matter far too small for the eye to see. This doctrine
influenced Newton, who had had correspondence with Boyle on
chemical subjects. With the prestige of the Cambridge scientist
behind it the atom came to be accepted as the fundamental basis
of all matter by the natural philosophers of the eighteenth century.

Newton in turn influenced Dalton.

But the Newtonian theory was a physical atomic theory. In New-
ton’s opinion atoms were regarded as infinitely hard (a judgment
which we know today is not true). Chemical combination, by which
one element combines with another to produce a compound utterly
unlike either, was far too intricate and profound a process for New-
ton to explain. Not until John Dalton gave to the world the results
of his experimental work did the true understanding of these chemi-
cal relations emerge into sunlight. It was one of the most marvelous
feats of human intelligence. With Dalton a new science arose from
the shaken ashes of an old mystery.

In a thatched cottage in the little English village of Eaglesfield,
Cumberland County, John Dalton was born on the sixth day of
September, 1766, the second son of a poor hand-loom weaver. The
lad grew up learning mathematics, a little physics, some English
grammar and other subjects in the local Quaker school. Always
of a very serious disposition, young Dalton at the age of twelve
attempted to become a teacher. At fifteen he went to Kendal, a
neighboring village, to assist his cousin who kept a school. Here
he spent twelve years, finally becoming joint master with his elder
brother Jonathan when the cousin retired.

But the two awkward Daltons had little success in attracting
pupils. One of the students years later wrote in reminiscence: “The
school was not generally: popular, owing to the uncouth manners
of the young masters, who did not seem to have mixed much in

DALTON

society.” From what we know of him we might say what Welling-
ton once said of Napoleon, “He was emphatically not a gentleman.”

While at Kendal young Dalton was greatly encouraged by the
philosopher John Gough (1757-1825), who, although blind from
infancy, was master of several languages and knew every plant within
twenty miles by touch, taste and smell. Gough was also an expert
meteorologist. To Dalton he communicated this passion to know
nature at first hand, to observe carefully and to keep minute and
systematic records. As Dalton rarely mixed in society or went out for
amusement, it was comparatively easy for him to act on Gough’s
encouragement. In 1787 he began a meteorological diary, which he
maintained thereafter for fifty-seven consecutive years, making more
than two hundred thousand observations.

Through the efforts of John Gough, the young Quaker from
Kendal was appointed teacher of mathematics and natural phi-
losophy in the Academy in Manchester. Dalton was now in his
twenty-eighth year, and he had behind him his first publication.
Meteorological Observations and Essays (1793), which contained
the germs of his great future theory. In the following year the
Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society elected him to mem-
bership. And this began a long period of mutual helpfulness. Dalton
needed just such a society; it elicited his Gargantuan energies. For
in a full half-century of membership, during which he held suc-
cessively the offices of secretary, vice-president and finally president,
he read before this Society one hundred and sixteen papers on
scientific subjects. “If I have succeeded better than many who sur-
round me,” he once said in later life, “it has been chiefly— nay, I
may say almost solely— from unwearied assiduity.”

Dalton spent his entire life (he died in his seventy-eighth year)
teaching, experimenting, theorizing, and relating his observations
to tlie Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. His social
manners always remained imperfect; but we are not concerned
about that, for we are dealing here with a man who by his thinking
rather than his social graces has left a persistent influence on the
lives of mankind. Apparently Dalton did not care about people—
his life was one of immense disinterestedness in them, and his
manner was correspondingly both awkward and gruff. Those deep-
set eyes, square chin and massive jaws were set on the problems of

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

science and a desire to achieve in all things precision. And he who
increases precision increases control over life.

There are some men who work best alone. They are frequently
called lonely spirits. But who shall say that Spinoza or Henry
Cavmdish were lonely? Or that Kant, because he chose the deep
resources of his own mind, missed much by keeping aloof from
the pernicious emptiness of small chatter? There is, to be sure,
a difEerence between being lonely and being alone. Most people are
lonely because they cannot stand being alone-that is, they can stand
everything in the wide world except themselves. Like Spinoza,
Dalton was a man of modest tastes with a simplicity enriched by
the vivid colors of a fine imagination.

And Dalton was color-blind. Not until his twenty-sixth year did
he become aware of his handicap-and then only because his defi-
ciency had caused him several embarrassing incidents. When the
full meaning of abnormal vision dawned upon him, he was suffi-
ciently the scientist to make a detailed report of it to the Manchester
Society and to offer his own explanation. The explanation he gave
was unfounded, modern scientific research has established, but
Dalton’s own analysis attained sufficiently wide reputation to attach
his name to the condition, so that color-blindness until very recently
was commonly called Daltonism.

There is an old saying in biography that great men taken up
in any way are profitable company. The multiple and varied inter-
ests of genius are to be seen in Dalton’s life. He was very much at
home in meteorology, botany, mathematics, hydraulics, insect life,
navigation, geography, grammar— and above all in chemistry.

It was by no means an accident that the atomic theory was worked
out by John Dalton. He brought to the analysis of matter the same
scientific attitude of mind that characterized everything he did. He
was a votary of the relentless logic of facts. And even though he
was often in error, owing to the crudity of his instruments and
inaccuracies in experiment, he never deviated from the objective
and honest approach of science.

In all his many interests he showed the influence of John Gough
under whose tutelage he had learned the scientific attitude, the need
for the laboratory, and a deep respect for masses of observations. To
this early Gough tradition Dalton himself added an original and

DALTON

independent mind possessed of an exceedingly vivid imagination.
This led him not only to collect facts but to theorize about them.

For many years Dalton’s main interest was a subject usually re-
garded in those days as very dull. He studied the weather with
tenacity and thoroughness. Gough’s example, as we have already
seen, had started Dalton keeping systematic records. Among other
things, Gough had often discussed with his disciple the subject
of the weather; and Dalton chose this field for his nearest and
dearest hobby. It proved to be a happy choice, for it was through
the study of the atmosphere that Dalton began that train of think-
ing that led him to the atomic theory.

Since the days of Robert Boyle it had been known that the air is
not a simple element but a compound made up of gases. Dalton’s
monumental work consisted in his experiments with different
groups of gases. Leonardo da Vinci once said that experiments
never deceive— “Experiment is the interpreter of nature.” From
what Dalton saw with his own eyes in those experiments, and from
the conclusions which his genius prompted him to draw from them,
came the modern theory of the atomic structure of all matter.

The mind of the theorist is so constituted that it can never rest
content with an outward view of things. He lives with symbols and
speaks in words so that the abstract and the concrete are touched
in the same flight of thought. Dalton took pencil and paper in hand;
he sought to draw in black and white the vision that was taking
shape in his mind, for it occurred to him that the atoms of each
element are different. Oxygen is made up of atoms, nitrogen is
made of atoms, hydrogen, too— yes, all gases and all solids, indeed
all elements are basically atomic. But the atoms of each element
are absolutely different from all others. Thus, any one atom of
sulphur exactly resembles any other atom of sulphur, but is dif-
ferent from the atoms of every other element. You can take atoms
of oxygen and combine them with atoms of hydrogen and get water.
While you now have a fluid, this fluid is nevertheless still made
up of atoms of oxygen and atoms of hydrogen, ’ , , . ;

The Greek theorists had only said that water was built tip of

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

atoms— water atoms. They stopped right there, for theirs was indeed
a very simple picture. But with Dalton it was different. In reality
the so-called water atoms of the Greeks were not atoms at all, for
a particle of water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen. Further-
more, the Greeks did not possess even the remotest idea of how
different elements combine to produce a compound. Even had
they known that water was made up of two gases, they had no
means of knowing how. But Dalton did.

He now began to use his pencil and draw pictures. He knew
exactly what he was drawing. He had had a long apprenticeship
in the ways of observation and precision. And now his vision was
clear. First he drew circles to represent the atoms. Then separately
he drew marks within these small circles to represent the atoms of
each element. The oxygen atom he represented by a simple circle;
the hydrogen particle by a circle with a dot in the center; nitrogen
by a vertical line bisecting a circle. And so on, like this:

O Oxygen 0 Sulphur ® Zinc

O Hydrogen ® Silver ® Lead

0 Nitrogen ® Carbon ® Phosphorus

Chemical compounds he represented by placing these symbols in
juxtaposition:

®0 Nitrous gas
#0 Carbonic oxide

GO Water
O® Olefiant gas

In picturing more complex structures he simply carried out his basic
principles so that:

Carbonic acid looked like this C#0

Ammonia
Alcohol
Ether

Those persons who were privileged to listen to his explanatory
lectures may have taken these pictures as nothing more than graphic
illustrations. But they were infinitely more than that to Dalton.
For him they were real, as actual as if he had seen them with his

DALTON 85

own eyes and handled them with his own hands. All these pictures
he worked out for himself slowly, painfully, blunderingly.

It was admittedly crude, but it proved to be a highly important
representation. Fellow scientists ridiculed it as pictorial jugglery.
Nonetheless it took its place as the first system of atomic notation—
remarkably clear. How different was this Daltonian conception
from the views of the old Greek philosophers? They had claimed
that atoms were infinite in number and infinitely various in forms.
Dalton saw that this was not true; there are only as many different
kinds of atoms as there are different elements.

Not only did Dalton stress the view that the atoms of the various
chemical elements differ from each other, but he boldly asserted
that they possess different weights. Each atom has a fixed and un-
varying weight of its own. But how can one arrive at the weight
of an unseen particle? Dalton theorized that he could achieve for
every atom only its relative weight. It became only necessary to
choose some substance as a standard. He started with the lightest
atom he knew anything about: hydrogen. Taking its weight as a
basis for his calculations he assigned to it the number 1. Hence
the weight of the atoms of all other elements must be relative to
hydrogen and must be greater than 1. Thus if one pound of hydro-
gen unites with five and one-half pounds of oxygen (as Dalton’s
experiments led him to calculate), then obviously the weight of
the oxygen atom must be five and one-half times that of hydrogen.

In a paper that he read before the Manchester Society on October
21, 1803, Dalton said that his investigations into the relative weights
of the atoms “is a subject, as far as I know, entirely new; I have
lately been prosecuting the inquiry with remarkable success.” We
do not know the exact nature of the experiments that led him to
the results that are found on page 287 of the first volume of the
new series of the Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society
of Manchester. But there they standi

Many of the original atomic weights assigned by Dalton to the
various elements are now known to Be inaccurate. But these were
errors made in the early morning of chemistry when he had only,
his own crude instruments to work with, Even so his results were
remarkable. They represent the first table atomic weights. ^

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

From time to time Dalton made considerable changes in these
tables in his eager search for accuracy.* As we follow his thinking
we are always conscious that we are in the presence of a “research”
mind. Detecting and identifying facts and discovering their varied
relationships is research. Without research there can be no theory.
Facts are the body of science; theory which combines these facts is
its spirit.

While Dalton was developing the many interesting facts of his
doctrine, a stormy controversy broke out between two chemists,
Joseph Proust and Claude Berthollet. It was a serious fight over
a subject of impressive significance in the history of atomic theory.

Proust (1755-1826) maintained that chemical elements always
unite in definite proportions by weight to form compounds. By
the quantitative analyses he made he was thoroughly convinced
that ail compounds obeyed this law with extreme accuracy. “Ac-
cording to my view,” said Proust, “a compound is a privileged
product to which nature has assigned a fixed proportion.”

Berthollet (1748-1822), in a book entitled Essai de Statique
Chimique, strongly opposed this doctrine, holding to the opposite
view: namely, that proportions could vary indefinitely, that in fact
variability is the rule and definite proportions the exception. Proust
and his followers maintained that the composition by weight of pure
nitric oxide is always 14 of nitrogen to 16 of oxygen. Berthollet and
his followers maintained that this was not necessarily so, that the
composition of nitric oxide is not constant and that to 14 of nitrogen
there could be different amounts of oxygen around 16, depending
on the method of preparation of the compound.

Dalton examined the arguments of the two exponents and soon
became convinced that Proust was right despite the fact that Ber-
thollet was at that time the most authoritative living chemist, besides
enjoying the prestige of having been a companion of Napoleon on
the Emperor’s expedition to Egypt in 1799. By bringing his atoms
into play Dalton confirmed the overwhelming truth established by

• Each, year the Intemafipn^ Cbnunission on Atomic Weights produces a re-
vised table which today usually undergoes little change. Notwithstanding the
errors in Dalton’s weights' the principle was dear. .

DALTON

Proust that every compound is made up of two or more elements
combined together in definite numerical proportions by weight.
To explain why the same amount of oxygen always unites with the
same amount of hydrogen to form water it is clearly necessary to
know that there are atoms of each element which unite on a basis
of definite numerical proportions by weight. Salt, for example, is
made up of two elements: the atoms of sodium and the atoms of
chlorine. How do they unite to form salt? For every 23 parts by
weight of sodium there are found to be 35^ parts by weight of
chlorine. That is, the sodium atoms combine with precision with
the atoms of chlorine to produce salt. It is plain that if the atoms
which make up the elements never vary in weight, then the com-
position of every true chemical compound never varies. This is the
law of definite proportions. It needed an explanation and Dalton
provided it.

A good theory not only guides experiment, it anticipates it.

Dalton was forever going back to his subject to make new dis-
coveries by suggesting new connections between old ideas or new
applications of old methods. His desire was to complete the mas-
tery of atomic structure and to provide himself with new oppor-
tunities for a deeper and more accurate grasp of it.

So far he had used his theoretical knowledge to explain and
clarify the chemical laws formulated by other men. It was one
vast ungrudging effort toward accuracy. Now he began some ex-
periments of his own to elucidate a new law of chemistry which was
to give additional and more conclusive evidence that his vision
of the atoms was no idle dream or absurd hallucination. The facts
he had in hand conspicuously matched the expectation deduced.

This law is known as the law of multiple proportions.

Simply put, the law states that many pairs of elements combine
to form more than one compound. If you combine the same ele-
ments in different proportions by weight you get different results.
Dalton had been working with olefiant gas (ethylene) which is
made up of 12 parts by weight of carbon and 1 part by weight of
hydrogen. By varying the proportiohs-rthat is, by combining 12 of
carbon with 4 of hydrogen— he got carbureted hydrogen (methane).
Or, take water. Oxygen and hydrogen can unite to form water (on

88 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

the basis of 2 parts by weight of hydrogen with 1 6 parts of oxygen).
However, if you change the proportions say, 32 parts by weight of
oxygen with 2 of hydrogen, you get not water but something difiEer-
ent called hydrogen peroxide. Thus if one element forms several
compounds with a second element, the weights of the latter which
unite with a constant weight of the former stand in the proportion
of simple whole numbers such as 2:3, 1:3, etc. (But always the num-
bers must be simple whole numbers, never fractions, for Dalton s
system did not allow numbers to be split.) Proust too had observed
that some elements combine in more than one proportion by weight.
But he failed to observe that these varying proportions bear a simple
multiple relation to one another. In other words, Dalton added the
knowledge that the increase is made by simple ratio. “You are right
in this,” wrote the great Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius (i 779 '
1848) in a personal letter to Dalton. “You are right in this that the
theory of multiple proportions is a mystery without the atomic hy-
pothesis; and as far as I have been able to see, all the results gained
hitherto contribute to justify this hypothesis.”

A theory does one of two things: either it proves its capacity to
elucidate the facts or it breaks down under the strain. The law of
multiple proportions confirmed Dalton’s theoretical position. He
found that his generalization was a simple way of co-ordinating
tangled phenomena; it not only elucidated the facts, but it dis-
closed previously unobserved relationships. By means of this theory
the scientist was now able to penetrate into the details of the world
not directly accessible to his senses. Moreover, it showed the vast
world of matter to be a system subtly interconnected. That which
was vague and faulty could now be clarified, and even relationships
that were previously announced but still partly obscure were pres-
ently open for illumination.

The Daltonian doctrine may be summed up as follows: the sim-
ple atoms of an element (1) are all alike in size and weight, and
(2) cannot be created or destroyed; but (3) may unite with other
atoms in simple ratios to form compound atoms or molecules.

In this simple broad generalization John Dalton bound together
out of his clear organizing head the law of multiple proportions,

DALTON

I Proust’s law of definite proportions, Lavoisier’s law of the conserva-

i don of matter and the law of reciprocal proportions. Actually the

I law of the conservation of matter became a corollary of the atomic

I theory, for if atoms are uncreatable and indestructible, then all

j matter composed of them must possess these same characteristics.

I No new creation or destruction of matter is within the reach of
I chemical agency, Dalton xvrote in his JVezo System of Chemical

Philosophy. We might as well attempt to introduce a new planet
into the solar system, or to annihilate one already in existence, as
to create or destroy a particle of hydrogen. All the changes we
i can produce consist in separating particles that are in a state of
i cohesion or combustion, and joining those that were previously at
j a distance.”

Dalton was deeply impressed with the universality of his theory
and its practical application. Had he been a man given to pride
he could have been justifiably vain. But Dalton, despite his gruff
ways, was a simple, kindly soul. Just as the invention of printing
gave wings to the interchange of thought, so Dalton felt that the
atomic theory would lift chemistry to the high plane of an exact
science and spread far and wide the beneficence of its extraordinary
i effects.

Above all his theory gave him a strong sense of the interrelated-
ness of all things chemical; without it the masses of observations
and experiments coming down from ancient days to the modern
age were “without law and order by which the whole becomes
: intelligible.”

In the long course of man’s existence on earth he has been the
victim of a thousand illusions, fallacies, wrong assumptions, half-
i grasped notions and grotesque speculations. What a host of dis-
I torted ideas! Occasionally there arises out of this awful jungle
a genius with strength enough to make his own clearing in the
forest and sufficient skill to erect a palatial theory possessing archi-
tectonic qualities. Such a genius was Dalton— ^a classical architect of
, ideas.

A recluse in his habits, Dalton had but few friends. He preferred
to explain his views before the Literary and Philosophical Society
of Manchester. In several papers that he read before that body

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

he hinted at his atomic theory, but it was not until 1803 that he
made known his table of atomic weights. As we have already seen,
it was in October of that year that he read a paper before the
Society, setting forth the various stages in the long course of care-
ful reasoning which led him inevitably to think in atomic terms.

In addition to his papers Dalton gave an account of his views
to one of his very few friends, Xhomas Thomson (i 773 "^^ 52 )’
influential professor of chemistry at Glasgow. Thomson was so
completely won over that he lost no time in incorporating the
theory in the third edition of his System of Chemistty (1807) •

A year later Dalton published the first volume of his own book
entitled A New System of Chemical Philosophy. With the appear-
ance of these two books the atomic theory of matter belonged to
the world.

In the history of science so many theories have been full of
postulated entities (to make the system intelligible) and fictions
needed for their explanatory value, that it is not at all surprising
that the Daltonian doctrine of atoms met with opposition. Many
were the jeers leveled at the Quaker theorist of Manchester. His
atoms were regarded as “false,” “unnecessary,” “an attempt to give
an unnatural precision to ideas which are and must be vague.” Even
when critics were more charitable they regarded his atoms as a
fiction needed only for their explanatory value— demonstrably non-
existent, employed temporarily to further investigation but ulti-
mately to be abandoned.

For more than half a century after his death many eminent men
of science looked upon the Daltonian brain child as an illegitimate
speculative error. Gradually of course they were won over. Even
as late as 1904 Professor Wilhelm Ostwald, one of the leading chem-
ists of the world, was making an attempt to persuade scientists to
abandon the idea of an atomic structure of matter. He too finally
withdrew his objections.

Why?

Because the increase of scientific knowledge demonstrated that
atoms are not imaginary things. It was discovered that they possess
a structure of dimensions lying far beyond the limits of microscopi-
cal visibility, and that they are just as real as any other object in the

DALTON 91

universe. Far from being mere “aids” or “pictures” or “models” or
“helps,” they were found to be in truth real.

Oftentimes a theory will outstrip the genius who gave it birth.
The atomic doctrine came to rest its reception on the amazing num-
ber and significant kind of things it rendered coherent and intel-
ligible. Some of these newer significant things Dalton could not
see at all, for he did not fully grasp the rounded circle of atomic
meaning which automatically opened up a new world of experi-
ment, conjecture and inference.

There was the case for example of the distinguished French
scientist Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac (1778-1850) who, shortly after
Dalton published his theory in 1808, gave to the world his results
on the volume relations of reacting gases, in which he showed that
the volumes entering into combination bore to each other and
to the products (if gaseous) a simple numerical ratio. In other
words, Gay-Lussac discovered that gases, under the same conditions
of temperature and pressure, always combine in definite numerical
proportions as to volume. Exactly two volumes of hydrogen, for
example, combine with one volume of oxygen to form water. (“Vol-
ume” means any volume-unit for measurement such as a quart, a
liter, or a gallon.)

One would suppose that Dalton would have grasped at the oppor-
tunity of applauding the discovery of Gay-Lussac, that he would
have found tremendous satisfaction in witnessing further confirma-
tion of his atomic theory which the work of the French scientist
certainly afforded. Strange to say Dalton did not react that way
at all. He chided Gay-Lussac for inaccuracy and disputed his con-
tribution. Doctor Thomas Thomson wrote him a letter in which he
spoke glowingly of the Frenchman’s work: “The most important
paper respecting your atomic theory is by Gay-Lussac. It is entirely
favorable to it, and it is easy to see that Gay-Lussac admits it.”

Thomson’s words fell on deaf ears. Dalton was obstinate and
refused assent. Fortunately for science, so impersonal is its forward
march, Dalton was left almost alone in his singular opposition to
Gay-Lussac. Other men saw and inoved on. , ; : ' ,

There have been instances : in the history of thought when a

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

great idea overwhelms and obsesses the man who gave it birth.
He becomes its slave and death alone parts them. Usually such men
are intolerant. It is hard for them to realize that anyone is able
to improve upon or advance their original ideas.

Dalton’s attitude towards the work of Gay-Lussac was repeated
in his antagonism to the work of Baron J. J. Berzelius, the Swedish
chemist, who, next to Dalton himself, was then perhaps the most
influential scientist in the world. Berzelius (who championed and
advanced the atomic theory) devised a system of chemical notation
that was acknowledged on all sides as a vast improvement over
Dalton’s.

Dalton, as we have seen, had originated the first system of atomic
notation (chemical shorthand), consisting of circles with various
configurations and markings within them. To indicate a compound,
he joined one circle to another. In the really complex compounds,
such as were being discovered by many men, the analysis showed
them to be made up of so many different kinds of atoms that
Dalton’s circles were speedily seen to be cumbersome and awkward.
Since each circle had to be large enough to show the markings
within it, and each atom had to be represented, it was apparent
that any compound particle containing more than three or four
atoms (and of course most of them do contain more) would be an
extremely inconvenient thing to write down in this kind of atomic
notation.

So Berzelius, conceiving the Daltonian system to be an awkward
and outworn vehicle, devised another method of notation. Each
element (that is, the atom of each element) was designated by a
letter of the alphabet (or in some cases two, never more). Thus
oxygen was designated as O, hydrogen as H, silver Ag (from the
Latin name argentum), copper Cu (Latin cuprum), chlorine Cl, and
so on. Sulphuric acid, for example, contains two atoms of hydrogen,
one of sulphur and four of oxygen. Under Dalton’s system it looked
like this

w'hereas Berzelius wrote it simply as H2SO4.

Great as was Berzelius’ advance over Dalton, the Manchester

DALTON

philosopher nevertheless fulminated against the Swedish system,
denouncing it as a chaos of atoms calculated “to cloud the beauty
and simplicity of the atomic theory.”

But Dalton was wTong, very wrong— apparently unable to see
that others could promote the growth and refinement of his ideas.

All men are perplexing creatures; they are rarely consistently
consistent or consistently inconsistent. Despite Dalton’s opposition
to the work of Gay-Lussac and Berzelius, the atomic theory spread
rapidly for the whole world of chemistry was ripe. One chemist
after another took up his theory, studied it, applied it to his own
problems and was amazed at its power to clarify age-old puzzles.
So great was its world reception that learned societies in many
countries began to take cognizance of the lone scientist who had
explored those hidden and all but trackless recesses of nature.
Everywhere men were now eager to hear Dalton and pay tribute
to his genius.

London called him, Glasgow and Edinburgh, too. With each
lecture his popularity grew. The French elected him to their Acad-
emy, and in 1826 the Royal Society of England conferred upon him
its first Royal Medal. Sir Humphry Davy made the presentation
address in which he embodied these exciting words: “Mr. Dalton’s
permanent reputation will rest upon his having discovered a simple
principle universally applicable to the facts of chemistry, in fixing
proportion in which bodies combine, and thus laying the founda-
tion for future labors respecting the sublime and transcendental
parts of the science of corpuscular motion. His merits in this re-
spect resemble those of Kepler in astronomy.”

John Dalton now became John Dalton, F.R.S. (Fellow of the
Royal Society). Later on he added six more honorary letters after
his name: Oxford conferred upon him a D.C.L. and the University
of Edinburgh its LL.D.

In the summer of 1822 Dalton visited Paris. The graciousness
of French hospitality combined with warm evidences of high esteem
for his accomplishments made a profound impression on the man
who first saw the light of day in a lowly thatched cottage in rural
England. Laplace invited him to his estate at Arcueil, where Dalton

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

was introduced to Berthollet, Biot and others— “a most agreeable
and interesting visit and a beautiful place.” The next afternoon he
saw Gay-Lussac, who was now president of the French Academy
where Dalton was to be seated as a corresponding (English) member.

Within the short span of a few days he strolled the gardens of
Arcueil with Laplace on one arm and Berthollet on the other,
conferred with Gay-Lussac and Humboldt on meteorology, visited
the laboratory of Ampere where he looked at powerful apparatus
for showing new electromagnetic phenomena and walked to the
Jardin du Roi for dinner with Monsieur and Madame Cuvier and
their beautiful daughter Clementine.

He visited London again. “It is a surprising place and well worth
one’s while to see once, but the most disagreeable place on earth
for one of a contemplative turn of mind to reside in constantly.”
He preferred Manchester, his laboratory, his experiments and his
evenings at the Literary and Philosophical Society.

But he always remained the same, a humble Quaker dressed in
the habit of a Quaker— knee breeches, gray stockings and buckled
shoes. The simplicity of his clothing matched his sturdy uncom-
promising mind-plain, outspoken (sometimes rude), with no desire
for display or self-laudation of any kind. To the end of his days
society was foreign to him; he preferred his recluse habits and
to the very last he kept his provincial accent and bucolic manner.

By 1840 Dalton was conscious, vaguely, as his years passed, that
he was deteriorating. He was beginning to complain of his failing
powers— “I succeed in doing chemical experiments, taking about
three or four times the usual time.” His heavy frame, always robust
and muscular, was now slowly giving way. The atomic theory, his
microcosmic vision, remained in his mind clear and unstained; but
beyond this there was little. The theory that was being expanded
and developed in clarity and detail by other scientists in Dalton’s
mind remained virtually stagnant.

Among investigators the rarest are those with a presentment
of new truth. In recognition of this gift the citizens of Manchester
erected a life-sized marble statue in honor of their fellow citizen
who had brought such distinction to their city. Dalton himself
was pleased with this token of affectionate veneration; “he acqui-

DALTON

esced with the modesty, simplicity and excellent feeling that grace
his character.”

When the news of Dalton’s death was heard throughout the world
on the morning of July 27, 1844, was the scientific com-

munity saddened, but men and women in all walks of life knew
that they had lost a unique member from within the common-
wealth. Forty thousand persons, in reverent testimonial to his lofty
intellect and humble spirit, filed past his coffin as it rested on a
simple catafalque in the darkened Town Hall of Manchester.

On August 12 he was buried in Ardwick Cemetery.

It was already evident to a large group of advanced thinkers,
even before the death of Dalton, that the atomic theory would bring
together the science of chemistry and the science of physics, and
by fusing these two branches of knowledge open up unknown
worlds which no previous generation of men had even vaguely
imagined. The study of the atom soon became a borderland en-
terprise between chemists and physicists, two companies of indefat-
igable searchers for extreme precision. This overlapping inquiry
within the short span of half a century yielded an enormous amount
of accurate information.

Science is speciali2ation. But it is also collaboration, for the es-
sence of science is to arrive at identity through the complexities
of difference. A series of investigations, started in many fields, con-
verged upon a single focus proving (a) that atoms are real, that
they are entities even though the average diameter of the atom is
not more tlian one-three-hundred-millionth of an inch, and (b) that
all matter is electrical. The old idea that electricity was something
distinct from matter, something superadded to the atom, was dis-
credited. Nothing in all science is now more assured than the knowl-
edge that the structure of the atom is electrical.

In the middle nineties of the last century an astonishing set of
discoveries, which centered in the atom, came in quick succession.
In 1895 Rontgen discovered the x-rays; in 1896 Becquerel an-
nounced the phenomenon of radioactivity; and in 1897 the British
physicist J. J. Thomson told the world about the electron. John
Dalton knew a great deal about the laws governing atoms, but

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

nothing about what goes on within the atom. The electron was
the first of the primordial particles within the atom to be isolated
and studied. From these early investigations a wholly new and un-
anticipated world sprang into being— the world of subatomic reality.

The discovery of the electron was the first proof that the atom
had any parts. Dalton assumed that atoms were ultimate bits of
matter not further divisible. But the work of those younger men
who followed him has given ample evidence that, far from being
the hard impenetrable unit as originally conceived, the atom is
the most porous entity in the universe.

As seen today the atom is a highly complex structure built up
of three sorts of units: the electrons, which are units of negative
electricity, the protons, which are positive, and the neutrons, which
have no electrical charge. These are held apart within the atom by
forces which are not yet fully understood. All the protons in any
atom are gathered close together at the center, along with some of
the electrons, forming a compact dense portion which is called the
nucleus.

Taken as a whole, the modem atom was believed to be (up until
a decade ago) a kind of miniature solar system with the center
(nucleus) corresponding to the sun because it contains practically
the entire mass of the atom. The outlying planetary electrons were
pictured as revolving at relatively remote distances in their orbits.

Aside from the majestic thought that the subatomic worlds
within the atom seem to afford the key to the ultimate unfolding
of the age-old secrets of the universe, it is a marvelous feat to be
able to possess some comprehension of this invisible structure. And
even if the older planetary view is now undergoing necessary modi-
fication we will eventually have another picture more in harmony
with the demands of the theory of relativity on the one hand and the
quantum theory on the other.

In 1924 Louis Victor, Prince de Broglie, advanced the hypothesis
that the electron was not a single particle of electricity, but that
it was composed of, or possessed of, a group of waves similar to
those of light. So far have the wave properties of the electron been
confirmed that an atom is now regarded as a region permeated by
waves. Whether we are to continue to picture the atom as a minia-
ture solar system, or as an electrical machine, or in terms of wave-

DALTON

like ripples in a bowl of water, the important thing is that the
atom is here to stay and the fabulous success of recent atomic
physics has only just begun.

In less than a century after the labors of Dalton, the atoms he
loved so well are given a new pictorial dress. No longer are they
spoken of as the hard “brickbats” or the “billiard balls,” or even
the “foundation stones” of matter. Impenetrability is gone! In its
place we have the modern atom with its electron, proton, neutron,
positron, conceived by the cumulative work of J. J. Thomson,
Planck, Rutherford, Bohr, de Broglie, Millikan, Heisenberg,
Schroedinger, Dirac, Compton, Chadwick, Anderson, and a whole
army of youthful investigators who are determined to penetrate
completely this wonderworld of the invisible and bring back ele-
mental forces wherewith to revolutionize man’s existence on earth.

The outermost frontier is not the atom but the world buried
deep within the atom.

“I am of the opinion,” said Sir William Bragg, “that atom energy
will supply our future needs. A thousand years may pass before
we can harness the atom, or tomorrow might see us with the reins
in our hands.”

4. Lavoisier .... theory of fire

AGAIN we go back to the Greeks, to those ancient thinkers who
thought so much and guessed so much more. As science grows by
accumulation it is always helpful to see how each of its triumphs
was slowly achieved. Out of very simple beginnings have come
magnificent results.

The theory of fire illustrates the gains of cumulative effort.

As early as the fifth century b.c. we find that certain Pythagorean
philosophers— especially Heraclitus— believed that fire was the ulti-
mate matter or principle of the universe. According to this antique
view, combustion meant the reduction of a body into its elemen-
tary form. The Pythagoreans taught that during combustion a com-
plex structure is turned, by the agency of fire, into one of more
simple constitution. The idea that a body diminishes on being
burnt implies that it has lost something. Consider a candle. A taper
burns and is reduced in size: apparently some part of what was im-
prisoned in the candle has now departed. This belief in something
lost persisted up until the eighteenth century and was embodied
in a powerful theory that misled science for three generations.

Plato, Aristotle, Empedocles and other less-known thinkers had
something to say on fire, but their explanations of combustion were
based on no experiments. True, they pondered the nature of such
phenomena as light, heat, motion and electricity. Here and there
in their writings one comes across a sentence that shows a flash of
shrewd and penetrative insight. However, too little was known
about these agencies for the thinkers of antiquity to arrive at any
adequate knowledge about them. For one thing, the philosophers
could not discuss the interrelations between these phenomena sim-
ply because no one ever suspected that such interrelations existed.

LAVOISIER

In the chapter on John Dalton we saw that fire was considered
one of the four elements. Under the name of fire the ancient and
medieval thinkers included everything either really or apparently
of the nature of flame. The fact that flames issue from burning
bodies led to the view that fire and its manifestations were elemental
things, not quite as tangible as water or earth but nonetheless
material.

But the real nature of fire was not understood. When people
thought at all about the subject they either attributed to it some
semireligious or mystical significance, or they adopted the so-called
common-sense view: that fire is a very fine material substance, an
excessively light species of matter universally distributed through-
out nature. In varying and mysterious degrees this “fire-matter”
entered into intimate association in the composition of all things.
This material view, which regarded fire as a substance, is the con-
ception that held sway during the long dark ages of alchemy, when
the theory of the four elements was playing the dominant role.

It is truly an amazing thing when one comes to think of it that
fire, which man discovered in the early stages of his culture, should
have remained a complete mystery up until the eighteenth century.
This, of course, does not mean that man did not understand how
to use fire. On the contrary, the mastery of fire for use is one of
the very early turning points in the development of humankind—
an achievement justly celebrated in innumerable myths and legends,
the possession of all primitive folklore. Prometheus, snatching the
element of fire from the region of fire (empyrean), is the symbol
of this mastery.

There is, to be sure, a wide difference between mastery and
mystery. A man may master the driving of an automobile and at
the same time be utterly mystified by the mechanical principles
involved in its construction and operation. For countless centuries
men had used fire for cooking, for warmth, for illumination, for
signaling, for ritual purposes. Fire became so intertwined with
daily life that it was taken for granted, so familiar that it needed
no explanation. ' V;;-'

The phenomenon of burning or combustion is perhaps the most

lOO

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

familiar, the most spectacular and the most impressive of all chemi-
cal processes. When, in the course of intellectual progress, the
demand finally came for a scientific explanation of fire and its
associated phenomena, the best that could be done to explain it was
phlogiston *— the answer of Professor Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-
1734). Although it proved to be wrong, it takes its place in the
history of chemistry as the first theory evolved by that science in
its triumphant march towards truth.

If you want to know what the phlogiston theory is ask yourself:
What happens when something burns? Professor Stahl essayed an
explanation and failed miserably. Yet his abortive answer is one of
the most interesting attempts at theory in the annals of science.

Stahl was born at Anspach in Bavaria, a small town about ninety
miles north of Munich. His chief interests were medicine, chemis-
try and anatomy, broad fields of knowledge that were just begin-
ning to awake from their medieval slumber. An omnivorous reader,
Stahl had amassed a huge store of knowledge by the time he received
his medical degree from the University of Jena. He was only twenty-
three years old, but no one was more eager than he to push onward
the frontiers of knowledge. By the time he was twenty-seven this
prolific and versatile theorist became Court Physician at Weimar.
Already he was a veteran in the art of thinking, having battled
through many foggy days in his early gropings. Scores of theorists
have exalted to the domain of natural law what turned out to be
a baseless hypothesis, yet their efforts involved an enormous amount
of labor and sacrifice. This certainly was true of Stahl and his
phlogiston doctrine.

What led Stahl early in his career to the study of fire was a gen-
uine interest gained in his youth from that eccentric but keen
spirited teacher of chemistry, Johann Joachim Beecher (1635-1682),
author of a curious book which he dedicated to God— whom he
called the Almighty Compounder— written “in a strange, familiar,
yet striking style, leaving the sympathetic reader in doubt as to
whether it is impious, or merely impious, or actually though fan-

• The word phlogiston comes from a Greek word meaning burnt.

LAVOISIER

101

tastically pious.” Himself a fiery personality, Beecher made the
whole subject of combustion extraordinarily fascinating, for it oc-
cupied a central position in his fantastic pagoda of chemical specu-
lations. More of an alchemist than a chemist, this odd and extrava-
gant enthusiast of fire propounded a theory of his own which later
proved to be a starting point of Stahl’s phlogiston doctrine.

But Stahl was an original thinker and his debt to Beecher is
much less than has been granted. To trace his predecessors is not
sufficient to account for the rise of an idea in the mind of a theorist.
The historical sequence may at times prove grossly inadequate.
Take the case of Dalton. To say that Gassendi, Boyle, and Newton
believed in the granular structure of matter may give one a mislead-
ing version of what happened in Dalton’s mind. Only after Dalton
had been at work for many years did he gain some help from other
thinkers. Even then it was on the physical and not on the chemical
side of the problem. The same is true of Darwin. Actually he knew
very little about his numerous predecessors; many years after the
evolutionary theory had assumed shape in his mind he came to
realize that others had anticipated him along related lines of
thought. Stahl originated the phlogiston theory, not Beecher. He
was its author, but not the author of many strange ideas which
were later incorporated into it.

Stahl claimed that phlogiston is 'an inflammable principle which
escapes when a substance is burned. The more inflammable the
substance, the more phlogiston was supposed to be present. Appar-
ently Stahl did not think of phlogiston as having any weight. (His
followers, however, did.) It seemed to him that it was a phe-
nomenon somewhat like light, an agency which could cause various
effects and still be devoid of weight. Many different things can be
burnt, such as wood, metal, coal, paper, cloth— substances differing
widely from each other yet alike in being combustible. To Stahl
this meant only one thing: that these differing substances have a
principle in common which he chose to call phlogiston.

This hypothetical “fire-stuff” of Stahl’s was supposed to be em-
bedded in every combustible substance; If you burn, let us say, a
metal or a piece of wood, the ash which remains is the original

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

substance now denuded of its phlogiston. Stahl proved to his own
satisfaction that sulphur was a compound of phlogiston and sul-
phuric acid. He did it in this way: he took coal (supposedly rich
in phlogiston) and with it he heated sulphuric acid. Sulphur was
again regenerated. This experiment offered to Stahl a satisfactory
explanation of his theory. Fire or flame was therefore regarded
as free phlogiston— something deeply imprisoned and now set free
only because the substance which contained it underwent a process
of reduction.

Some theories go through a long period of travail and agony
before they are accepted. Usually these are the true theories. By
a curious irony a false doctrine seems to gain an amazingly quick
popularity. No sooner had Stahl announced the principle of phlo-
giston than the leading chemists throughout Europe widely shouted
their assent. The explanation of burning that Stahl offered (as
equivalent to a loss of phlogiston) seemed to solve a host of diffi-
culties besides having the merit of co-ordinating many observations
which had hitherto been viewed in isolation. Stahl was now the great
hero. He was called to the chair of medicine, chemistry and
anatomy of the University of Halle, and with the increase of his
fame came his final appointment. Physician to the King of Prussia
at Berlin.

Actually Stahl’s theory was nothing more than the swan song
of alchemy. Upon investigation its pseudo clarity was made in-
creasingly painful. This, of course, was not immediately evident
for the simple reason that old ideas give way slowly because they
carry with them deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and pref-
erence. When confronted by facts which had been overlooked in
the unwarranted enthusiasm for the theory, the followers of Stahl
(now called phlogistonists) invented all manner of absurdity. Wasn’t
that exactly what happened in the case of the Ptolemaic theory? As
observation detected more and more which was incompatible with
that ancient doctrine, did not its exponents embroider it with pious
confusion? They first tried to pin the thoughts of the new to the
fabric of the old, and the result was a bizarre and shapeless thing.
Then they worked even harder to patch the Ptolemaic error instead
of asking themselves straightway whether, after all, its basis were

LAVOISIER 103

laid in truth? The phlogistonists likewise wasted their time in
tinkering with Stahl’s theory.

Take such a case in point as this. To the phlogistonists all metals
were regarded as compounds made up o£ the calx (ash) of the metal
plus its phlogiston. If you burnt a metal you were supposed to
have released the imprisoned phlogiston so that all that was left
was its calx. It was noted however that when a metal is calcined
(burnt) its calx actually weighs more than the original product.
How does one explain that? On the basis of Stahl’s theory the loss
of phlogiston should have caused the calx of the burnt metal to
weigh less. If the balances showed (as they certainly did!) that the
calx weighed more, then obviously the most natural inference would
be that the calx must have taken on something rather than having
emitted it.

The phlogistic schoolmen answered this argument by subterfuge
in two ways. At first they said that the variation in weight was
an unimportant matter unworthy of one’s attention; then they con-
cocted the idea of negative weight, an explanation based on the
principle of levity. This meant that phlogiston makes bodies lighter
(just as bladders attached to a swimmer lighten him), so that driv-
ing it out of a metal actually leaves the residue heavier.

It is now known, of course, that the picture presented by Stahl
and his followers is almost the exact inverse of the real facts:
instead of giving off a substance a metal in burning takes on
oxygen which increases weight, scf that the calx actually weighs
more than the metal. In the light of what was later proved to be
the true story of burning, the conclusions of Stahl and his disciples
were the merest moonshine. Science is a gradual secession from
unwarranted assumptions. The kind of a theory that Stahl offered
was little more than pastry. “My child,” once wrote Anatole France,
“beware of pastry. Pastry is factitious, adventitious. It is whipped
cream which fails to hide the poverty of the cake.

In appraising the work of a theorist one must always take into ac-
count the knowledge of his time and the use he made of that knowl-
edge. This, to be sure, is the only fair and charitable way in which
to judge any man of science. Considering the age in which he lived

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104

Stahl was an unquestionably penetrating and ingenious thinker.
Like others before him he did the very best he could with the lim-
ited knowledge available. Yet an enormous amount of damage must
be laid at Stahl’s door. He was a leader as well as a misleader of the
science of his day. His theory befogged investigators for more than a
hundred years. Only after its destruction was it properly viewed as
a monument of misplaced ingenuity. While it breathed it was a
powerful obstacle that sidetracked the ablest minds into a cul-de-sac.
Fortunately, here and there a few chemists were strong enough not
to allow the phlogistic dogmas to bother them, but on the whole
the entire world of science was held back and its spirit retarded.

Why were the leading chemists gullible? It is hard to say. Per-
haps this explanation may be ventured; characteristic of any age
is a body of beliefs and a group of feelings associated with them.
This involves an inability to examine and discard a way of thinking
which seems at the time to be rooted in the very structure of the
mind itself. It seemed so true, so obvious, so much a matter of
simple common-sense observation that when a candle burns a flame
is emitted out of the candle itself. Thus when Stahl associated
combustibility with the presence in the combustible body of a
constituent he called phlogiston, the world was ready to accept his
explanation. The principle of phlogiston seemed to be something
axiomatic like the venerable principle of the perfect circle in
Ptolemaic astronomy. The fundamental postulate that the world,
having been created by God, must therefore be perfect, combined
with the idea that the circle was the perfection of symmetry, led
to the dogmatic belief that the planets must necessarily move in
circles. To think otherwise was outright heresy. It took Kepler
almost a lifetime to emancipate himself from the circle idea as the
only possible orbit for a planet. It took science nearly a hundred
years to free itself from phlogiston. Once the emancipation was
effected there was inaugurated a line of discovery endless in variety
and extension.

Out of the smoke of argument and counter-argument lasting a
century there emerged that demigod of French science, Antoine
Laurent Lavoisier, whose achievements have already been briefly
mentioned in the chapter on John Dalton. It was he who com-

LAVOISIER

105

pletely demolished the phlogiston theory and showed Stahl’s ideas
to be nothing more than a mirage above the shimmering sands
of arid speculation.

With Lavoisier science was action not words; from those who
emphasized talk he demanded verification. “Chemists have made
phlogiston a vague principle,’’ he remarked with cutting sarcasm,
“which is not strictly defined and which consequently fits all the
explanations required of it; sometimes the principle has weight,
sometimes it has not. ... It is a veritable Proteus that changes its
form every instant. It is time to lead chemistry back to a stricter
way of thinking.” And he did. By the irresistible force of facts
he drove phlogiston from its fastness, first by the reach and fathom
of his demonstrations, and secondly by overhauling the old assump-
tions. Long before he announced to the world his oxygen theory
of fire he had proved to himself that Stahl’s doctrine was just an-
other hypothesis in a jumble of claims and counterclaims that was
choking science.

Knowing the world for what it is, the wonder grows that there
can appear any man so eccentric as to regard the pursuit of truth
as the paramount issue of life. Like a fresh strong wind Lavoisier
swept through the world of chemistry exhibiting a shocking insen-
sibility to the cherished notions of his fellowmen. So cleansing was
the storm he generated that the age-^old webs of medievalism were
torn down. Yet his work was no sudden and unheralded revelation.
The time was ripe for the formulation of a correct theory of fire;
it needed but the genius possessed of a venatic instinct for first
principles, a sort of pointing at them as a dog does at game, that
grasp “which the healthy imagination takes of possible truth.”

Like Boyle, Lavoisier was born of an opulent family, and like
Boyle he came early in life under the influence of able teachers.
The world of science was laid before him and invited his devo-
tion. A young man of many talents, his precocious mind quickly
absorbed the mathematics, chemistry, astronomy and practical busi-
ness affairs of France. At the age of twenty-three he was an authority
on illumination, in proud possession of a gold medal especially
awarded to him by the king in recognition of his brilliant essay on
the artificial lighting of the streets of Paris. At twenty-five he was
admitted to membership in the French Academy. “I am sure that

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106

your eyes are dancing with delight now that your nephew has been
elected to the Academy,” wrote a friend to his Aunt Constance.
“How splendid that at so early an age, when other young men are
occupied in amusing themselves, he should have made great con-
tributions to the progress of science, and have obtained a position
which is usually won, with great difficulty, by men past their fif-
tieth year!”

Upon his entrance into the Academy, Lavoisier combined a pub-
lic life and a scientific career of ceaseless and untiring energy. He
was assigned at once to several committees which had under con-
sideration a variety of subjects. First, there was the question of
the drinking water of the city of Paris. Water, from whatever aspect,
had always been an absorbing study with him. His vast and accurate
knowledge of it is one subject, among many, which renders his name
so illustrious. Water— and foods, too. For Lavoisier is justly regarded
as the father of the science of nutrition. But there were other
public matters equally clamorous for his attention. Paris needed
hydrants for protection against fire, and Lavoisier was farsighted
enough to advocate them. He submitted a report to the Academy
covering the approximate cost of their manufacture and installa-
tion, together with very careful drawings showing the efficiency
of different types of pumps. The pursuit of all things in a scientific
spirit took a veritable demoniacal hold of his mind. It led him into
a bewildering variety of subjects: the cultivation of cabbage, the
working of coal-mines, the decomposition of niter, the manufacture
of starch, a study of ink, fossils, tapestry making, engraving, dyeing,
tobacco, oils, grease, marble, cess pools, manufacture of plate glass,
fuels, nutrition of vegetables. The list is too long.

He wanted money, more and more of it, to be able to devote his
time to science, to equip laboratories, to finance experiments, to
purchase expensive equipment and make his own apparatus, how-
ever costly. Since he was an independently rich young man, these
visions were not idle pipe dreams; yet he felt his income was not
enough.

. 8

A few days after his nomination to the Academy, Lavoisier en-
tered the business world with the thought of increasing his wealth.
He bought an interest, iti the Feme, a company of financiers who

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107

for a certain sum, fixed every six years and paid annually to the
Government in advance, purchased the privilege of collecting the
national taxes of France. The company had an ancient history,
going back to the fourteenth century; it was organized at first to
meet a temporary emergency in the Government, and subsequently
continued to supply a valuable and permanent need. It was charac-
teristic of Lavoisier that before entering the Feme he had made
a detailed study of its history, its operations, and its place in the
general economic structure of the country. He also knew, alas, only
too well, that the Feme was universally hated, not only because
people dislike tax collectors in general, but also for those corrup-
tions, real and imaginary, which from time to time had brought
the company into public disfavor. Lavoisier’s colleagues in the
French Academy on the whole objected to his alliance with this
corporation. And they were right, notwithstanding the fact that
Lavoisier’s motives were free from taint.

Actually, the young scientist had visions of being helpful to his
country. He would exert his influence to stop abuses; by serving
on the Feme’s committees he could suggest ways and means which
would lead to positive reforms redounding to the credit of all.
Then too the Feme would certainly give him wide scope for his
administrative ability and scientific interests— problems of agricul-
ture, soils, foods, animals, housing, manufacturing of all kinds,
chemicals, transportation. What an array of practical interests to
whet his appetite! Could a young man wish for anything better?
Lavoisier took his appointment seriously.

The actual work of the Feme was heavy. Lavoisier met it with
energy and enthusiasm. He did not mind the long journeys into
various parts of France, for on these occasions he combined with
his business mission scientific observations of various sorts. Each
time he returned to Paris to make his reports his associates at the
Feme recognized his growth, his grasp, and his increasing admin-
istrative skill.

In the course of his work in the Feme, Lavoisier struck up a
close friendship with a much older ofiicial, the wealthy and influ-
ential Jacques-Alexis Paulze, whose beautiful daughter Marie was
in her early teens. The house of Paulze was well known in Paris
as the meeting place for men interested in the related fields of

108 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

banking, government and economics. Leaders like Turgot, Minister
of the Treasury, Condorcet, and Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours
were to be seen here in frequent and important discussions where
plans for the Bureau of Statistics on taxes and commerce were
known to have been drawn up.

Into the Paulze home came Antoine Lavoisier— a welcome pros-
pect for Marie. Both were good-looking, she short in stature and
only fourteen years old, he tall, handsome, and twenty-eight. They
fell in love with each other to the delight of Monsieur Paulze, who
prayed for this escape for his talented young daughter from the
hands of another suitor, the penniless Comte d’Amerval, fifty years
old. After a brief courtship, Marie Paulze became Madame Lavoisier
on December i6, 1771, in the presence of a brilliant gathering
of notables.

The bride and groom went to live in a house of their own, given
to them by Lavoisier’s father in the Rue Neuve-des-Bons-Enfants.
Their income was liberal; not only did the husband have his
resources, but Marie in her own right could nearly match his.
Here in this residence the young couple passed three gloriously
happy years; here Marie Lavoisier early in her married life began
to train herself to be her husband’s lifelong assistant, illustrator,
translator, and amanuensis; and here too she began to entertain
in the spirit of old aristocratic France, achieving a grace which
made her salons famous and unique in the world of science.

In 1775 Lavoisier’s father died, and in that same year he was
appointed head of the French Government’s Powder Works. The
appointment came through Turgot, who acted upon a suggestion
made by Lavoisier himself that the Government undertake its own
production of gunpowder in order to reduce costs and insure ade-
quate production. Up till now the manufacture of gunpowder had
been in private hands, men who charged the Government enor-
mous prices and were putting out an inferior product. Turgot
canceled their contracts and proceeded to establish a Regie des
Poudres—z. strong administrative committee of four able men.
Lavoisier was appointed chief rdgisseur. The choice of this young
man to so important a post met with wide approval, particularly
from Dupont de Nemours who said of Lavoisier, “He is a man as

LAVOISIER

, , , , , , 109

; well known for Ms disting^^^ work in chemistry, essentially
necessary for this kind of administration, as for - the 'energy, the
ability and honesty which he shows in the business of administration
of the taxes/'

What a joyous day it was in the life of the Lavoisiers when they
packed their household effects and moved to the Arsenal Turgot
had assigned them a private residence there, which was to be their
home for the next seventeen years, until the French Revolution
drove them from it. These were intensely busy, crowded years,
full of administrative tasks in connection with the Arsenal, the
Ferme^ the Academy. Then there was scientific work of a varied
nature to be reported upon, data to be collected, experiments to
be undertaken, and theories to be carefully thought out. All this
Lavoisier had to do while giving technical advice to the Govern-
ment, serving on the Committees for Agriculture and for Weights
and Measures, maintaining a huge correspondence with widely
scattered men, and writing a book which was to revolutionize the
science of chemistry. Multiple tasks of a superman.

One of the very first things that Lavoisier did, upon taking up
his residence in the Arsenal, was to establish a private laboratory
with his wife as assistant. Out of his own pocket he fitted up work-
rooms with all manner of costly apparatus; then he threw the doors
of his home wide open to admit any scientist who wished to com-
municate with him and learn of his experiments. As his fame grew
his laboratory became the meeting place for the leaders of the scien-
tific world. Men came from far distant places to see him, Priestley
from England, Benjamin Franklin from America, Ingenhousz from
Austria, Fontana from Italy.

10 - ■■

Himself a young man, Lavoisier encouraged other young men
to visit his laboratory, to witness its demonstrations and occasion-
ally to assist him. Pierre Dupont, realizing how much of an oppor-
tunity this presented, was able to have Lavoisier accept his son,
Eiuthere Irenee Dupont, as a paid assistant in the Arsenal This
marks the beginning of the Dupont fortune; for Eiuthere, having
escaped from Paris during the Revolution, came to the United
States with an advanced knowledge of gunpowder obtained from

110

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Lavoisier’s laboratory. He was quick to realize that Americans
were manufacturing a product of a very poor grade, and therefore
decided to set himself up in that business. On a tract of land in
Delaware, near where Wilmington now stands, he established in
1802 the firm of E. I. Dupont de Nemours.

Because Lavoisier’s laboratory contained the very latest and best
apparatus procurable, many young French scientists came there
to do some work of their own and experiment under his direc-
tion. Lavoisier was their inspiration. Not only was he generous
with his time and money (his aunt. Mile. Punctis, died in 1781
and left him her entire fortune), but he showed an understanding
at once penetrating and vigilant, the more remarkable for the
caution and sureness of its march. In recalling those early years
in the Arsenal laboratory Madame Lavoisier long afterwards wrote:
“Some scientific friends, and a number of young men proud to
be allowed to assist in his experiments, would meet in his labora-
tory early in the morning. They would have their meals there . . .
and discuss scientific subjects, and it was in this atmosphere that
the theory which has immortalized its author was born.’’ Here in
this laboratory, until he was condemned to death by the terrorists
of the French Revolution, Lavoisier embodied the philosopher’s
thirst for truth, the artist’s struggle for self-expression, the pioneer’s
wrestle with nature, the prospector’s zest for discovery and the
idealist’s pursuit of supreme excellence.

How did Lavoisier demolish the grandiose edifice erected by Stahl
and the phologistonists? The first blow was administered by his
experiments on the calcination of metals. Stahl claimed that a metal
was a compound made up of its calx plus phlogiston, and his
followers added the absurdity that phlogiston possessed weight—
a negative weight— which made the metal weigh more after burn-
ing than before! Basically, Stahl’s theory maintained that when
a metal was calcined it was converted into an ash, giving up its
phlogiston in the process.

An experiment is the language of the scientist addressed to na-
ture. Lavoisier wanted a reply^ He began by examining every
phase of the process of calcination whereby the phlogiston in the

LAVOISIER

111

metal was supposed to be driven off. In all previous attempts to
explain the phenomenon of combustion an effort was made to show
that something was removed. The phlogistonists said that burn-
ing is a process of decomposition. Far from finding that phlogiston,
or any other substance, was thrown off, Lavoisier discovered the
very opposite: that “something” was taken on and it was this some-
thing that caused the ash of the metal to weigh more. Ten ounces
of lead weighed more than ten ounces after having been burned
to a calx. Actually, they ought to have weighed less, if phologiston
were really a material substance.

By repeated experiments, by accurately weighing his reagents
and products over a period of eleven years, Lavoisier concluded
that oxygen was this “something” taken on— oxygen taken right
out of the air. At every step of the way he measured the quantities
of the substances with which he was working. He found that when
metals, sulphur, phosphorus, carbon and similar substances are
burned in air they increase in weight to an extent exactly equal
to the volume of oxygen which they derive from the atmosphere.

These experiments called a halt on the unbridled fancy of the
phlogistonists. No longer would they be able to ask serious-minded
men to believe in the existence of a hypothetical substance that
could not be separated or isolated or weighed. Lavoisier showed
that phlogiston and its purely imaginary properties could not stand
the test of the laboratory. The long chemical war against phlogiston
was therefore on its way to victory, notwithstanding the fact that
Stahl’s theory was sufficiently dramatic, sufficiently widespread to
cause feeling to run high. When in 1789 Lavoisier published his
Elementary Treatise on Chemistry, the world learned that the con-
ception of phlogiston and all that went with it was unnecessary;
together with negative weight it slowly vanished from science.

By introducing the balance into chemistry as an instrument of
precision, Lavoisier placed the new science upon the definite quan-
titative basis of an exact discipline. It provided the coup de grace
to the whole system of outworn methods. As soon as the balance
was applied to chemical processes, Stahl’s theory was doomed. By
the keen temper of his logic Lavoisier realized from the outset that
there could be no progress without the ability to weigh and meas-
ure all things chemical. “I often say,” once declared Lord Kelvin,

“that if you can measure that of which you are speaking and
express it by a number you know something of your subject; but
if you cannot measure it nor express it by a number, your knowl-
edge is of a sorry kind and hardly .satisfactory. It may be the begin-
ning of the acquaintance, but you are hardly, in your thoughts,
advanced towards science, whatever the subject may be.”

Weight and proportions, numerically expressed, formed the basis
and test of each experiment undertaken in the Lavoisierian labora-
tory. Nothing was left to chance or vague hypothesis. Exact cog-
nizance was taken of every quantity gained or lost. That is why
the results were so accurate— and so revolutionary. Through
Lavoisier’s efforts the balance is today perhaps the most character-
istic single tool of scientific chemistry. The increased exactness
of all chemical knowledge, down to the amazing precision possible
with our modern balances, the so-called microbalances, by which
a difference in weight of one two hundred and fifty thousandth
part of a miligram can be detected, is mainly due in its origin to
this citizen of the old

12 -

The theorist is a man possessed of a rare combination of talents.
He must reach a high standard in several different directions and
must combine intellectual gifts not often found together. He must
take the knowledge available in his day, rediscover it, reinterpret
it and synthesize it. He must refuse to live in the past, although he
must gladly seek light from the past to illuminate and make clear
the path toward the future. Above all he must be an experimenter—
“to substitute the description of facts for a sham explanation of
nature.” In Lavoisier the French people produced just such a genius-
theorist.

Having explained burning he now undertook to explain respira-
tion (breathing) . For countless thousands of years men have known
that in common with other animals they have lungs and that breath-
ing is inhaling and exhaling air. But what actually went on in the
lungs or what part of the air is drawn in was unknown. By means
of experiments, buttressed by his oxygen theory, Lavoisier showed
that burning and respiration are alike in kind— one a quick and
the other a slow process of oxidation each leading to an increase

ARCHITEGTS OF IDEAS

LAVOISIER

in weight equal to the weight of the oxygen combined. Breathing,
in Other words is a form of combustion. So too combustion and
calcination are only different terms to express the general idea of
oxidation.

Before the advent of Lavoisier chemistry could be described as
“a collection of facts loosely strung together upon a false theory
of combustion.” With his demonstrations he re-ordered the tangled
data of chemistry so that it became a true science (organized knowl-
edge) . In scientific theories we should be able to see not only the
results of science but also the avenues of approach. The greatness
of Lavoisier is to be found not so much in his originality as in
his ability to rediscover and reinterpret facts. Other chemists must
be ranked higher than he as original discoverers— men like Priest-
ley, Cavendish, and Black. But no thinker of that age overshadows
him as a theorist. It is now nearly a century and a half since Lavoi-
sier gave to the world the many painstaking results achieved in his
home laboratory. Since that day in 1794 when he was guillotined,
eminent chemists have arisen and added their work to his. Not-
withstanding the massive achievements of his successors the mind
of Lavoisier soars over modern chemistry; he is its luminary.

Always a number of minds are very near a truth before any one
mind fully comprehends it. Bryan and William Higgins were very
close to the theory of the atomic structure of matter before Dalton
published his explanations. Certainly Alfred Russel Wallace ar-
rived at the theory of evolution just as Darwin proceeded to
announce his own work. Nor will anyone acquainted with the facts
deny that Augustin Fresnel in France, unaided and alone, reached
the idea that light waves are a transverse vibration in the ether
at the time that the celebrated Doctor Thomas Young in London
achieved the same conclusion. Theories are often the culminating
point reached through several lines of advance by widely separated
and independent thinkers. Yet in each case some one individual
achieves the final apotheosis. The predecessors and contemporaries
of Lavoisier helped to make the time ripe; but the linking together
of ideas whereby law and understanding supervene on chaos was
an expression of his own creative genius. .

Why did not Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) instead of Lavoisier

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

114

overturn phlogiston and establish the correct theory of combustion?
pe# A all Priestley was the real discoverer of oxygen. When he
visited Lavoisier in Paris, he explained to the Frenchman certain
new facts about air. This information supplied Lavoisier with
the right clue which led to the establishment of the correct explana-
tion. How was it that Lavoisier succeeded where others failed?
The answer is that Lavoisier had an architectonic mind, a mind
capable of putting together facts and figures as an architect puts
together plans and specifications. Priestley quarried the crude fact
(dephlogisticated air); in Lavoisier’s hands it became “oxygen.”
What was disconnected in Priestley’s mind became an harmonious
and consistent system in Lavoisier’s. In no way was Priestley’s skill
in discovery equal to Lavoisier’s ability as a theorist.

In the transformation of the raw material of facts into the fin-
ished product of a theory the personal factor of the theorist enters.
Rightly did Lavoisier resent the attempt to deny him the honor
of his achievement or to minimize his skill in bestowing compre-
hension. In his own mind he planned this magnificent temple of
theory and every enduring stone of it he laboriously carved out
of the sweat of his own struggle over a period of eleven intense
years. “That theory,” he stated emphatically, “is not, as I hear
it called, the theory of the French chemists, it is my own; it is a
possession which I claim at the hands of my contemporaries and
posterity.”

So far was Joseph Priestley from even the fringe of the new
theory or a realization of the vast significance of his discovery that
unto his dying day he stoutly upheld phlogiston. At the time of
his death most chemists had forsaken the Stahlian doctrine. With
his back against the wall Priestley fought bravely for a dead cause.
One of his last memorable acts was to write a book to refute
Lavoisier. It was entitled Doctrine of Phlogiston Established (1800).

Outworn doctrines and beliefs are like mandrakes; like those
living plants of old and fabulous renown they utter their cries
of pain when they are torn up. Yet it must be said in praise of
Priestley that he refused to compromise. To those who attempted
to sit on both sides of the fence he was rightfully contemptuous.
In a letter addressed to Priestley, a certain Doctor S. L. Mitchell

LAVOISIER

115

of Columbia made “An Attempt to Accommodate the Disputes
among the Chemists concerning Phlogiston.” He was willing to
admit the truth of much of Lavoisier’s work but wanted to retain
phlogiston. Mitchell concluded his letter somewhat humorously:
“Perhaps even now my labors are but of little avail; or if they
are capable of bringing about a coalition of parties, I might say
to you, after all, in the words of Prior in his ‘Alma’:

“ ‘For Dick, if we could reconcile
Old Aristotle with Gassendus,

How many would admire our toil!

And yet how few would comprehend usi’ ”

In reply to Mitchell, Priestley wrote that he thanked its author
for his “ingenious and well-intentioned attempt to promote a peace
between the present belligerent powers in chemistry; but I fear
your labor will be in vain. In my opinion there can be no com-
promise of the two systems.” Priestley was right even though he
was wrong.

To return to Lavoisier.

The opinion of Justus von Liebig, one of the leaders of the nine-
teenth century and founder of German industrial chemistry, rep-
resents an accurate appraisal. “He discovered,” says Liebig, “no
new body, no new property, no natural phenomenon previously
unknown; but all the facts established by him were the necessary
consequences of the labors of those who preceded him. His merit,
his immortal glory, consists of this— that he infused into the body
of the science a new spirit; but all the members of that body were
already in existence, and rightly joined together.”

Lavoisier was that rare individual who could apply facts with
telling effect. He not only revised and extended knowledge but
altered its assumptions— its theoretical base. Why? Because he was
possessed of a clear vision— “pensees. de la jeunesse, executees par
I’dge mur.” Take just such a simple fact as ordinary combustion.
Lavoisier’s handling of it was vastly different from all who preceded
him. For centuries it had been known that neither lamp nor fire
nor candle will bum without air. Stahl himself knew this; he knew,

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

for example, that even soot (which he regarded as almost pure
phlogiston) could not burn in the absence of air. Stahl, who was
forever casting his facts in the mold of his dogmatic hypothesis,
explained this on the assumption that phlogiston could not part
from a substance unless it had somewhere to go. Both he and his
followers regarded air as a kind of sponge which absorbed phlogis-
ton. A candle, if placed in a closed vessel, will burn for a while
and then go out. The phlogistonists explained this by saying that
the air (acting like a sponge) could only hold a certain amount of
phlogiston. Once the air was saturated nothing could burn in it.
Lavoisier showed that this explanation was ridiculous for it took
no cognizance of the fact that the volume of air actually becomes
smaller during the burning process. So too in the calcination of
metals: actually the volume of air decreases and the increase of
weight of the metals is exactly equal to the amount of air that had
disappeared.

When we glance back and compare Lavoisier’s performance with
the efforts of his predecessors, his achievements stand out in soli-
tary grandeur. When he first began to experiment in his laboratory
the knowledge of nature’s laws was ragged and incomplete; when
he died he left chemistry an unforgettable heritage of precision
which has illuminated the whole realm of modern science. No the-
orist living or dead deserves more the name of experimenter in
the sense in which Claude Bernard used it when he said: “To be
worthy of the name, an experimenter must be at once a theorist
and practitioner.’’

Equally as great as his oxygen theory is Lavoisier’s incomparable
generalization known as the law of the conservation of matter— a
significant and imperishable contribution.

Vaguely the idea of the conservation of matter was entertained
by some of the old Greek philosophers. Empedocles, for example,
argued that in the universe there was no creation, neither was there
any absolute destruction of the basic elements, but only changing
combinations and transformations. With the introduction of the
importance of weight in chemistry all chemists had more or less
tacitly assumed that during a chemical reaction the sum of the
weights of the reacting substances was always equal to the sum of

LAVOISIER,

117

the weights of the ' products. In other words, although the original
substances apparently disappeared and new ones took their place,
the weight of the substances always remained the . same at the end
as at the beginning of every operation.

Lavoisier performed very careful experiments to show that this
was really so: (a) that there is not anything in the beginning which
has not its precise quantitative counterpart in the end; (b) that
weight is an immutable thing in nature; (c) that no matter was
ever lost since all matter can be traced throughout and accounted
for by weight. By the unanswerable evidence of the balance he dem-
onstrated that every chemical operation ends in an equation, and
although matter may be altered by whatever chemical process, still
it does not change in amount

This principle is stated thus: matter can neither be created nor
destroyed..

Had Lavoisier been spared the revolutionary scaffold he would
have cleared up a number of chemical problems that were per-
plexing the scientific world. He had planned for himself, with his
wife as assistant, a series of experiments destined to extend the
range of knowledge which he hoped would lead to an assured con-
trol over natural agencies beyond the dream of poets and seers. He
was only fifty-one years old, in the prime of his experimental and
theoretical powers, when die terrorists of the Revolution sacrificed
him.

The leaders of die revolutionary proletariat in France saw in
Lavoisier not a scientist, but a member of the odious and detestable
Ferme. They spread the rumor that he was only masquerading as
a savant. Was he not a rich man, having inherited two fortunes,
married to a rich woman who was the daughter of that enormously
wealthy and influential plutocrat, Jacques-Alexis Paulze? And was
he not responsible for originating the proposal to build walls
around the city of Paris in order to prevent smuggling? Lavoisier
had estimated that approximately one-fifth of the goods entering
Paris was brought in illegally. His suggestion was therefore sound;
but the attempt to wall Paris proved unpopular. The project was
interpreted as a design on the part of the Ferme to imprison the
French people in. their capital and, still more heinous, to prevent

Il8 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

pure air from blowing over the city. To the revolutionists Lavoisier
was a privileged person belonging to the upper crust of society, the
lackey of the irresponsible nobility, member of the Academy (also
controlled by the king and his henchmen) and head of the Powder
Works— all for his own gain.

For a long time that frustrated bloodthirsty leader of the Paris
mobs, Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793), had been deeply envious of
Lavoisier. In 1780 Marat had written a chemical treatise devoid of
merit and submitted it to the Academy. Lavoisier was on the com-
mittee that turned it down, despite the fact that the Journal of
Paris had incorrectly announced that the paper had been approved.
Marat, now editing a vicious underground sheet called L’Ami du
People, kept up a brutal and relentless attack on Lavoisier. “I de-
nounce to you the Coryphaeus of charlatans, the sieur Lavoisier,
son of a land-grabber, pupil of the Geneva stockjobber, a farmer-
general, controller of gunpowder and saltpeter, governor of the
discount bank, secretary to the King, member of the Academy of
Sciences”— so ran the article of January, 1791. And more, too:
“Would you believe that this little gentleman, who enjoys an in-
come of 40,000 livres and whose only claim to public recognition
is that he put Paris in prison by cutting off the fresh air with a wall
that cost the poor 33 millions and that he removed the powder
from the Arsenal to the Bastille on the night of July 12 and 13,
is engaged on a devilish intrigue to get himself elected as adminis-
trator of the department of Paris? . . . Would to heaven that he
had been strung to a lamppost on August 6.”

By a decree of the National Assembly on March 20, 1791, the
Ferme was suppressed. Shortly thereafter Lavoisier resigned from
the Arsenal and moved to 243 Boulevard de la Madeleine. He was
now in constant dread for his life despite the fact that he had been
using his private fortune to keep the Academy alive. In revolutions
events move quickly. The king was guillotined in January, 1793.
On August 17 the rooms of the Academy were sealed and within
a few days Lavoisier’s house was searched.

The suppression of the Ferme did not end Lavoisier’s trouble.
Neither his eminence as a scientist nor his services to the State
could make a certain class of people forget that he had been a mem-
ber of that much-hated compaiiy of tax gatherers. For many years

LAVOISIER

119

the Ferme had been denounced as a den of robbers who despoiled
the people; now in the heat of social upheaval it came in for ter-
, rific (and largely unjustifiable) attack. An angry speech delivered
[ in the National Convention roused the people against the com-
pany. Its officials, called Fermiers Generaux, were ordered arrested,
t Lavoisier’s appeal to the Committee on Safety went unanswered,
and he was dragged into the cold and overcrowded prison of Port-
Libre along with his associates of the Ferme, including his father-
i in-law Paulze.

Lavoisier wrote to Marie. They were separated now by the cruel
hand of the Revolution. He advised her to save her strength and
; not wear herself out in useless attempts to gain his freedom. De-

; spite the discomfort of the prison he wanted her to know that he

was preparing his memoirs on chemistry. Several appeals were made
; for Lavoisier’s release, but they were in vain. More doubtless could
have been attempted in his behalf, but his friends, fearing their
own safety, refused to act. Finally Madame Lavoisier made a last
f moment effort to save her husband from the Revolutionary Tri-
bunal, in defiance of a law forbidding all ex-nobles from entering
Paris, but to no avail.

The decree of May 5, 1794, demanded that the Fermiers Generaux
be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. On the morning
of May 7 these men were put through the empty formalities of
being questioned— an exhibition of miserable knavery. The next
I day at ten o’clock they were brought before the tribunal, Coffinhal
presiding. The jury lost no time in unanimously declaring the ac-
I cused guilty. To Lavoisier, Coffinhal is reported to have said, “La

I Republique n’a pas besoin de savants” (The Republic has no use

for men of science).

On a guillotine prepared in the Place de la Revolution the
Fermiers Generaux were beheaded. Paulze was third, Lavoisier
fourth. They died on May 8, 1794, and their bodies were thrown
into nameless graves in the cemetery d’Errancis.

Two years after his death the French reversed the judgment of
Coffinhal. True, the dismembered body of Lavoisier could not be
brought back to life, but the nation solemnly strove to atone its

120

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

error in an impressive funeral ceremony. Orations in his honor
were publicly pronounced while friends at home and abroad
mourned his death. “The gravest crime of the French Revolution
was not the execution of the king, but the execution of Lavoisier.”

At the time of his tragic death Lavoisier was preparing an edi-
tion of his collected works with the aid of his wife who had worked
faithfully with him both on literary as well as on scientific prob-
lems. Theirs was a happy marriage, comparable to the productive
happiness of that other great French theorist, Louis Pasteur, and
the woman who shared his labors. What an unusual group of
women they were, these wives of the classical theorists.

Lavoisier’s justly famous Traite Elementaire de Chimie, which
appeared five years before his execution, has in it a series of dia-
grams and illustrations which were drawn and engraved by his tal-
ented and beautiful wife. Their marriage had indeed been an un-
usual partnership. And now that she was a widow, she alone gathered
the papers he had prepared and presented them to the world under
the title Memoirs de Chimie (1805).

It was a tender tribute to the dead.

5. Rumforc

THEORY OF HEAT

FOR centuries fire and heat have been household expressions used
to denote phenomena which appear alike but in reality are widely
separated. So close has been the linkage between them that, long
after the phlogiston of fire was acknowledged dead, its imponder-
able ghost survived in the so-called caloric of heat. As it took
Lavoisier to demonstrate the nonexistence of phlogiston, so it took
Count Rumford to demolish caloric. The theories of fire and heat
are for this reason interesting parallels in the history of science.

On every issue about fire the phlogistonists took the opposite of
the correct explanation. So did the calorists on heat. In both cases
what was incomprehensible to a large group of men was understood
by the lone individual who undertook to co-ordinate the data at
hand by a bold stroke of genius, namely, a unifying process. Great
theories are born in the minds of men of genius whose talents may
be compared to that of an artist. No more can a work of art be
produced by a committee of artists than can a great theory be
evolved by a round-table conference of specialists.

No matter how iconoclastic, a theorist must be capable of taking
all the past along with him. Legend says that Moses on the eve of
his departure from Egypt to the Promised Land carried the bones
of Joseph to symbolize continuity with the thought and personali-
ties of an older generation. Since he believed in the life of the spirit
he had reverence for the great spirits of the past. The theorist wor-
ships in a temple not easy to approach, a temple where the worship-
ers are few and the worship difficult. Over the portals of this tem-
ple are carved the favorite words of Vesalius, “One lives for the
spirit, all else belongs to Death.” ! ; ,

122

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

A crude heap of facts about heat was inherited by modern man
from the dim notions of the ancients and the equally vague no-
tions of medieval thinkers. To some of these men heat was a pe-
culiar substance having no weight; hence it was called an impon-
derable. Others spoke of it in terms of a “fluid” which permeated
the atomic spaces of matter and could be poured from a hotter to
a colder body as water is poured from a higher to a lower level.
Still others contended that heat was an indestructible substance and
uncreatable by any process; bodies became warmer when caloric
was added to them and grew colder as caloric left. Here they were,
an erroneous huddle of ideas, mingled with all sorts of faulty ob-
servations and half-formed conceptions. One need not trace in de-
tail the tangled channels through which these antiquated views have
trickled down the long winding course of history. What happened
is this: they became a part of the complicated network of tradi-
tional thinking. Popularity and acceptance regarded them semi-
sacred. To doubt that heat was a material fluid was to doubt the
wisdom of former generations.

When one lacks the data to lay an historical finger on the person
who originated an idea, perhaps the next best thing is to choose
that man in whom the idea, long in historical germination, finally
awoke to full significance. The material conception of heat became
a part of the scientific credo of an English doctor, William Gilbert
(1540-1603), physician to Queen Elizabeth and a man of consider-
able importance in the history of science. Fellow of St. John’s Col-
lege, Cambridge, and President of the College of Physicians, he
founded the sciences of electricity and magnetism. History justly
ranks him with Galileo and Harvey as an early pioneer in the ex-
perimental method long before Francis Bacon wrote of it. As a
matter of fact, Gilbert is repeatedly mentioned by Bacon, but since
Bacon rejected Copernicus, ignored Kepler, and seemed unaware
of Harvey, it is no wonder that he depreciated Gilbert.

The necessary combination of subtlety and vigor that makes a
man a theorist of great acumen is rare; We recognize these talents
in Gilbert notwithstand.ing the fact that his views on heat were in
error. In the circumstances of his time he could not succeed in

RUMFORD

arriving at the true explanation. Yet Gilbert was fully conscious of
the scientific value of experiment as a positive thing that links to-
gether the process of thought and the process of action. “In the dis-
covery of secrets, and in the investigation of the hidden cause of
things, clear proofs are afforded by trustworthy experiments rather
than by probable guesses and the opinions of ordinary professors
and philosophers.” These sound like tame words to us but in the
day when Gilbert wrote them they were upsetting to time-honored
ideas.

To Gilbert we owe many things: he gave us the word electricity
which he coined from the Greek word meaning amber; he wrote
a book called De Magnete in which he collected all that was known
about magnetism and added many fresh observations of his own;
he pointed out the importance of the magnetic needle for naviga-
tion, and finally he theorized about these forces in an effort to see
them bound together in a unitary structure. Many of his views were
medieval, half-formed mystical notions, such as his belief that mag-
nets possess some sort of soul or spirit. But these views, it seems,
were apparently unavoidable to one who embodied in his struggle
the emergence of science from the dark ages of superstition into
the modern spirit.

Gilbert regarded heat, light, electricity and magnetism as forms
of matter— excessively subtle and refined, capable of freely pervad-
ing and combining with all ordinary bodies. This notion of the
materiality of heat (or caloric a$ it is frequently called) was almost
universally accepted and taught until Sir Benjamin Thompson,
Count Rumford (1753-1814), demolished it. “I am thoroughly sat-
isfied,” declared Rumford in a letter to his friend Professor Pictet
of Geneva, “that I shall live a sufficiently long time to have the
satisfaction of seeing caloric interred with phlogiston in the same
tomb.”

Like those two famous Italians, Christopher Columbus and Le-
onardo da Vinci, Benjamin Thompson and Benjamin Franklin
were born only a few miles apart, Thompson in Woburn, Massa-
chusetts, a little village not more than twelve miles from Benjamin ,
Franklin’s native Boston. These two American Benjamins were
among the outstanding scientists of the age; yet theie is no indi- ■

124 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

cation that they ever knew or met each other. Curious. Both were
young men of unusual mental power, both were wondrously suc-
cessful in business and public affairs, both were scientists of rare
distinction— and yet there is not a shred of evidence to indicate
that they were even interested in each other’s work. Apparently
their paths never crossed, although Franklin visited Lavoisier in
Paris, and Rumford, after the death of his first wife, married the
great chemist’s widow.

Thompson’s early training was gained in a piecemeal fashion-
first there was John Fowle, a graduate of Harvard College, who
tutored him as a boy; then came a short session at a provincial
school which was followed by another brief tuition under a cer-
tain Mr. Hill and still another under the Reverend Thomas Bar-
nard of Salem. From the scraps of information that have come down
to us it appears that young Thompson possessed an unusually
active mind so that from the varied personalities of his tutors he
absorbed many different kinds of interests. When he was only
sixteen his search for comprehension of natural phenomena led
him to request a friend to “give the nature, essence, beginning of
existence, and rise of the wind in general, with the whole theory
thereof, so as to be able to answer all Questions relative thereto.”
There is no indication that the friend was able to oblige him.

At an early age he gave evidence of being able to do three things:
think for himself, experiment, and theorize. By self-practice he
became an able and accurate draughtsman and something of an
artist, too. In a prankish mood he sketched a group of spirited cari-
catures which he called “A Council of State” and which cleverly
depicted a jackass with twelve human heads.

The versatility of these men of theory is a continual surprise;
Thompson takes his place among them in the classical stream of
their manifold accomplishments. As he grew in mental stature, his
ingenuity was sufficiently large to meet every practical and theoreti-
cal problem in the long catalogue of his achievements. Without rely-
ing on the aid of a single person he designed his own inventions. In
those early years he undertook in a boyish way to experiment with
fireworks. This interest marked the auspicious beginning of a line
of thought which eventually led him to the discovery of the correct
theory of beat.

RUMFORD

125

Both physically and mentally Thompson matured early. Before
he was eighteen he was appointed teacher in Concord where he was
described as “of a fine manly make and figure, nearly six feet in
height, of handsome features, bright blue eyes and dark auburn
hair. He had the manners and polish of a gentleman, with fasci-
nating ways and an ability to make himself agreeable.” Recognizing
these qualities, the rich widow of Colonel Rolfe accepted him. She
was thirty-three, Thompson only nineteen. Many years after, to his
friend Professor Pictet, Thompson (then Count Rumford) remarked
somewhat ungallantly that she married him, rather than he her.

Proud of her acquisition, Mrs. Thompson committed her new
husband to the care of the best tailor and hairdresser in Boston.
With a rich wife and good clothes the striking personality of the
young man was bound to be noticed-especially when he made his
appearance on horseback. And so it happened. In lyya there was
held near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a large military review.
Thompson was among the soldiers who rode, and Governor Went-
worth was among the notables who were watching. Wentworth’s
eye was so charmed by the handsome equestrian figure that he
invited Thompson to be his guest on the following day. Pleased
as the governor was with the young man’s physical appearance, he
was equally impressed with Thompson’s mind. He immediately
assigned him to public service; and from that day to the end of his
long career, which took him*to England and the Continent, Thomp-
son was a man of public affairs.

In the ferment of discontent which preceded the American Revo-
lutionary War, Thompson was on the side of the Government, a
Tory. His royalist sympathies on tliese controversial matters brought
him into sharp disagreement and conflict with members of those
pre-revolutionary clubs and committees which had been formed
on the eve of hostilities to protect the interests of the colonists.
Everywhere feeling ran high; it was a critical and anxious stage
before the outbreak of armed conflict and it was particularly dan-
gerous for those suspected of Toryism. Thompson, the friend of
the Colonial Governor and the recipient of Wentworth’s favors, fell
under strong public disapproval. After several exasperating episodes

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

186

with the “Sons of Liberty,” he decided it would be safest to leave
the country rather than subrnit to further inquisition and continued
threats of mob attack. “I have done nothing that can deserve this
cruel usage. I have done nothing with any design to injure my
countrymen, and cannot any longer bear to be treated in this bar-
barous manner by them.” This is a part of a farewell letter he
wrote to his father-in-law, the Reverend Timothy Walker. But it
is not altogether true. His connections with the British General
Thomas Gage in Boston revealed definite royalist activities which
his incensed fellow-Americans sharply resented. Events finally led
to his arrest and, what was still worse, a humiliating experience
in being confined in Woburn. A “Committee of Correspondence”
was formed to review his case, and they discharged the prisoner.
Within a few days he was again examined by the Committee who
recommended him to the “protection of all good people in this
and the neighboring provinces.” “Our candor,” says George Ellis,
his biographer, “must persuade us to allow that there were reasons,
or at least prejudices and apprehensions, which might lead honest
and light-hearted men, lovers and friends of their birthland, to
oppose the rising spirit of independence, as inflamed by dema-
gogues, and as forboding discomfiture and mischief. They feared
that we should suffer the worst of the strife, and that the sort of
government we should be likely to have as the alternative of a
monarchy would probably make us largely the losers. Yet the utter-
ance of said views, if only as misgivings, might in many places be
equally impolitic and dangerous.”

Accordingly, on the 13th of October in the year 1775 this young
American of great promise sailed to England and expatriated him-
self, leaving his wife and infant daughter behind and his property
confiscated. In the letter to his father-in-law he expressed the devout
wish “that the happy time may soon come when I may return to
my family in peace and safety, and when every individual in Amer-
ica may sit down under his own vine and under his own fig tree and
have none to make him afraid,”

On his arrival in London he quickly attached himself to the
service of the British Colonial Office where he became its expert

RUMFORD 12 .>]

on American affairs. But always while busy with public matters
Thompson found time to experiment. Thought alone was never
sufficient for him-he felt the need for verification which guaran-
tees thought. As a youngster he had been interested in fireworks,
guns, and gunpowder; these things fascinated him not alone as
toys or sport, but because of their importance in world affairs. Up
until now his life had been one of close association with them
and, as far as he couFd see, it was destined to continue that way.
The adolescent interest now ripened into a mature search for accu-
rate knowledge. He began in earnest a series of experiments on
gunpowder. In addition to this he turned his attention to improve-
ments in military matters and promoted several new devices. Rec-
ognition of his ability was brought to the attention of the Royal
Society. In 1779 he was elected a Fellow. In 1784 he was knighted
by the king.

How often did Thompson think of his wife and daughter in
America? Unfortunately we don’t know. Many theorists have been
bachelors— Boyle, Hutton, Dalton, Cavendish, Huygens, Newton;
many have been happily married men— Lavoisier, Darwin, Pasteur,
Marx; and not a few have been celibates for the sake of the King-
dom of Heaven such as Copernicus and Gregor Mendel. But in
Thompson we meet a man who could find no peace or happiness
with the two women whom he married, or in any of the women he
chose for part-time affairs. When he left America he parted from
his wife; he never saw her again. Nor did he ever write to her.
When Mrs. Thompson died in 1792, Sarah Thompson, their only
daughter, was a grown young woman of eighteen years.

Shortly after receiving these English honors Benjamin Thompson,
now Sir Benjamin, w^as on the Continent. Unerringly he seemed
to know the way to his own advancement and to the distinctions
of Europe. No man ever lived who loved medals, decorations, hon-
ors, titles and rank more than he. He was recommended to the
Elector of Bavaria by Prince Maximilian who saw him on horse-
back, just as Governor Wentworth had seen him. On learning
that Thompson had served in the British Colonial Office and was
an expert on guns and gunpowder, as well as a Fellow of the Royal

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Society of London, the prince invited him to meet his uncle, the
Elector. Out of this meeting came a unique proposal: that this
newly knighted American-born British subject be offered military
and civil posts in the Government of Bavaria with full powers to
reshape and reorganize the army and to initiate important social
and economic projects. Thompson accepted. He became minister
of War, minister of Police, and grand Chamberlain to the Elector.
Reminiscent of the Biblical story of Joseph, it so happened, stranger
than fiction, that the once poor farmer lad from faraway New
England moved into a palace in Munich to exercise an authority
second only to the king’s. He was now on the road to world honors
and immortal fame.

With resolution he faced the difficult tasks of government, man-
aging to come through each project successfully by his genius for
organization. A man of method, Thompson approached every prob-
lem in terms of a scientific inquiry. So remarkable and varied were
his reforms in the fields of military, social and civic affairs, as well
as in education, sanitation, housing, land reclamation, hospital
work, poor-relief and food supply problems, that the Elector con-
ferred upon him the glittering title Count Rumford, nohlemm of
the Holy Roman Empire. This official recognition was enhanced by
a vast popular mark of esteem displayed during Rumford’s absence
from Munich in 1795-6. Without his knowledge a monument was
erected in gratitude for those manifold and superlative accomplish-
ments which he achieved for the people of Bavaria. On one side of
the monument, which was composed of Bavarian freestone and
marble, is a dedication to “Him who eradicated the most scandalous
of public evils. Idleness and Mendacity; who gave to the poor help,
occupation, and morals, and to the youth of the Fatherland so many
schools of culture. Go, Wanderer! Try to emulate him in thought
and deed, and us in gratitude.”

While public applause was still warm in enthusiasm for the
elegant Rumford monument on the Maximilianstrasse in Munich,
Miss Sarah Thompson sailed for England to see her father. The
Count had been ill, and when Sarah arrived, she was greatly dis-
appointed in his appearance. He was not at all the handsome knight
she had read about. There were other disappointments, too, for
Rumford was far from being an affectionate father.

RUMFORD

129

Not that he was ungenerous, but his mind was cold and imper*
vious to feminine claims. It may well be that he was too self-
centered, too demanding and impatient. At any rate his interests
were in other directions. While Sarah was with him he founded
and endowed the historic Rumford Medal of the Royal Society of
London, and on the same date he presented a like amount to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Both endowments were
identical in terms.

Early in 1796 Sarah was asked to accompany her father to Ger-
many. Shortly after their arrival in Munich she was made a Countess
of the Empire with a handsome pension conferred upon her by the
Elector, who stipulated that she was at liberty to enjoy it in an y
country she chose to live in. What with the aloofness of her father
and her intense dislike of the noisy life of Munich and London,
she decided to return to America as a place more suitable in atmos-
phere and tranquillity for one of simple tastes in living. She reached
Boston in the fall of 1799, “being then just twenty-five years of age.”

The road to ultimate success is most often the road of trial and
error, and the observer or investigator must always analyze the
observational process itself. Does he really see what he thinks he
sees? As a philosopher Rumford was aware of the dangerous tend-
ency of the human intellect to accept as valid a plausible explana-
tion and then look for facts in support of that explanation. In his
experiments on heat he was constantly on his guard to avoid this
error.

What led Rumford to heat? He had long been concerned with
military problems and had regarded gunpowder as an important
factor in the affairs of men and nations. The head of the British
Colonial Office at the time of his expatriation was Lord George
Germain who took a strong liking to this youthful expatriated
American. Germain frequently breakfasted and dined with his new
employee and invited him to his county seat, Stoneland Lodge.
It was here in 1778 that Rumford continued his scientific inquiries
into guns and gunpowder and the enormous amount of heat gen-
erated in their construction and use.

What he began as a boy in Wobum and continued in England

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

130

under Lord Germain he now carried on in Bavaria as Minister of
War to the Elector. “Being engaged, lately, in superintending the
boring of cannon in the workshops of the military arsenal in Mu-
nich,” he says, “I was struck with the very considerable degree of
heat rvhich a brass gun acquires In a short time in being bored.”
With these words Rumford begins the story of how he gave to the
world the first experimental demonstration of the immateriality
of heat.

By the upholders of the caloric theory it was believed that fric-
tion merely rubbed or squeezed out the heat from the interatomic
spaces of the bodies, just as water is squeezed from a wet sponge.
Rumford set out to prove that this sponge idea and all that it
implied was ridiculous. He did it by a few simple boring experi-
ments in the munition workshop. First he took a very blunt tool
(a borer) and arranged that the metal cannon should be surrounded
with water so that all the heat produced would go into the water.
Then he got a pair of horses to keep turning this blunt borer round
and round on its axis in order to generate heat by friction.

What happened?

The water got hotter and hotter. After tramping the circle for
two and a half hours the horses had generated enough heat to boil
the water. To the great amazement of the spectators the water con-
tinued to boil just as long as the horses continued their boring.
“One horse,” declared Rumford, “would have been equal to the
work performed, though two were actually employed. Heat may
thus be produced merely on the strength of a horse, and, in a case
of necessity, this heat might be used in cooking victuals.”

This was the first time on record, at any rate, that water had been
made to boil without the use of fire. “In reasoning on this subject,”
Rumford said, “we must not ioxg&t that most remarkable circum-
stance, that the source of the heat generated by friction in these
experiments appeared evidently to be inexhaustible.” (The italics
are Rumford’s.) “It is hardly necessary to add, that anything which
any insulated body or system of bodies can continue to furnish with-
out limitation cannot possibly be a material substance; and it ap-
pears to me to be extremely difficult, if not quite impossible, to
form any distinct idea of anything capable of being exited and
communicated in those experiments, except it be motion.”

RUMFORD 131

With regard to the favorite illustration of the calorists, who
compared heat to water contained in a sponge which could be
“squeezed out” or “rubbed out,” Rumford replied: “A sponge filled
with water and hung by a thread in the middle of a room filled with
dry air communicates its moisture to the air it is true, but soon
the water evaporates and the sponge can no longer give out
moisture.” Such is not at all the case with heat; the boring experi-
ments showed that the supply of heat was inexhaustible. The
sponge idea was an erroneous illustration of what happened. In
place of the evaporating sponge Rumford suggested a vibrating bell,
“A bell,” he declared, “sounds without intermission when it is
struck, and gives out its sound as often as we please, without any
perceptible loss. Moisture is a substance, sound is not.”

Rumford recorded his experiments, his observations and his
theory in a paper entitled Enquiry Concerning the Source of Heat
which is Exited by Friction. The net result of his work was to
destroy the entire conception of the corpuscular view of heat which
regarded heat as a substance. The long-vexed questions over the
supposed existence of an igneous fluid or a something called caloric
(heat stufE) came to an end. Rumford’s experiments were conclusive;
he established for all time that heat is not a species of matter but
a species of motion and that no body either gains or loses weight
by virtue of being merely heated or cooled.

His theory became an effective formula to work with, a key which
no lock refused.

A scientific hypothesis is more than a guess— it is a preliminary
supposition which, lacking full proof, nevertheless leads to better
understanding. Count Rumford began his work on heat with only
a tentative hypothesis; this he passed through the purgatory of
experiment before he announced to the world the proof of his
theory. To experiment means to start out from ideas as well as
facts. “Science walks on two feet— theory and experiment. Some-
times it is one foot which is put forward first, sometimes the other,
but continuous progress is made only by the use of both,”

In every arduous enterprise it is pleasanter to look back at diffi-
culties overcome than forward to those which seem insurmountable.
The principles announced by Rumford are now clear, but they were

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

132

hidden by many deceptive veils. Robert Boyle experimented on
heat problems before Rumford was born. He too generated heat
by friction. But his explanations were false for he believed in the
materiality of heat. Simple as facts are, they are nevertheless notori-
ously difficult to find. A trained observer is often slow to recognize
them even when they stare at him. Indeed, it is surprising how
simple all great discoveries in science are, after somebody else has
made them.

Besides Boyle, one could mention at least five illustrious thinkers
who had the germ of Rumford’s idea— Hooke, Locke, Descartes,
Newton and Hobbes. The vague hypothesis that floated in their
minds was incubated and nourished by Rumford until it developed
into a mature and self-sustaining doctrine. From a hypothesis bar-
ren of results it became in his hands a theory fertile beyond expec-
tation. In a book entitled Heat as Mode of Motion John Tyndall
summarized the work of Rumford in one sentence: “When the
history of the dynamical theory of heat is completely written, the
man who, in opposition to the scientific belief of his time, could
experiment, and reason upon experiment, as Rumford did in the
investigation here referred to, may count upon a foremost place.”

The memorable paper on heat was submitted by Rumford to
the Royal Society after he had left Bavaria. He was now living
again in England. With advanced ideas on the practical aspects of
heat Londoners kept him busy telling them how to remodel their
fireplaces and chimneys, how to save on fuel and at the same time
get better results. Those who took his advice were amazed at the
increased efficiency achieved at small costs. He could have kept
himself occupied with these practical problems to the end of his
days had he been so minded, but he had been thinking about the
possibility of returning to America. Rufus King, then United States
Ambassador in London, offered Rumford an exalted position. “I
am authorized,” said Ambassador King in the name of the newly
established republic, “to offer you, in addition to the superin-
tendence of the military academy, the appointment of Inspector-
General of the Artillery of the United States; and we shall moreover
be disposed to give to you such rank and emoluments ... as would
be likely to afford you satisfaction, and to secure to us the advantage
of your service.” Despite, his nostalgia for America and the allure*

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ments of the position offered Rumford did not go. Another project
laid hold of his imagination— a project into which he poured his
rare genius for organization and for science. This was the creation
of the Royal Institution of Great Britain (not to be confused with
the Royal Society) in which he took the leading part.

That the Smithsonian Institution should have been founded by
an Englishman is no more curious than the establishment of the
Royal Institution by an American. Did Smithson receive his inspi-
ration from that pamphlet of fifty pages wherein Rumford set
forth the purposes of the Royal Institution? The pamphlet carried
a rather lengthy title: “Proposals for forming by subscription in
the Metropolis of the British Empire, a Public Institution for
diffusing the knowledge and facilitating the general Introduction
of Useful Mechanical Inventions and Improvements, and for teach-
ing, by courses. Philosophical Lectures and Experiments, the Appli-
cation of Science to the Common Purposes of Life.” Upon examina-
tion the title not only sets forth the purposes of the Royal Insti-
tution, but it seems to be a lucid statement of the personal vision
and ideas of Rumford’s life.

Among the many notable things that this intensely practical
theorist did for the Royal Institution was to call to its service the
talents of a young chemist Humphry Davy. In the story of theories
we constantly witness the interlocking of great minds. Stimulated
by Rumford, Davy was anxious to supplement the experiments on
heat which had been carried out in Munich. This eager desire to
confirm Rumford’s theory led Davy to enrich the subject with a
very simple but beautiful demonstration in which he rubbed
together two pieces of ice until they were completely melted by
friction. According to the old caloric theory two pieces of ice when
rubbed could not melt because there was no “heat substance” in
them. But Davy showed that they did melt and the change from a
solid to a liquid form was generated by friction which did not come
from any outside source. Thus without any difference of tempera-
ture (and therefore no flow of caloric from the temperature into the
ice) Davy produced melting simply by rubbing. Why? Because rub-
bing “stirred up,” as it were, the atoms in the ice causing them to be

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less cohesive. If, argued Davy, it is clearly possible to melt ice by
friction from within, why believe in caloric from without? Other
experiments added further confirmation to Rumford’s views. Hav-
ing with his own wings soared over the newly discovered ocean of
truth, Davy announced in 1812 the following statement in his
Elements of Chemical Philosophy: “The immediate cause of the
phenomena of heat, then, is motion, and the laws of its communica-
tion are precisely the same as the laws of the communication of
motion.”

The last years of Rumford’s life were spent in his mansion at
Auteuil on the outskirts of Paris. He was a lonely man for his mar-
riage to Madame Lavoisier had not been successful and they were
now separated. In these declining days the thought that he had been
responsible for Davy’s enormous success at the Royal Institution
gave him cheer, especially since Davy had so beautifully confirmed
his own theory of heat.

It is sad to think that Rumford could not live happily with the
widow of the great French chemist. Had he been able to adjust
himself to her, his remaining years might have been full of radiant
sunshine. Their courtship gave every promise of such an outcome—
both were intelligent, interested in science, both possessed social
distinction and great wealth. But— each had too much temper.

Before his marriage to Madame Lavoisier he wrote a letter to
his daughter extolling her virtues. She was all that a man could wish
for— “very pleasant in society, has a handsome fortune at her own
disposal, enjoys a most respectable reputation, keeps a good house,
which is frequented by the first philosophers and men of eminence
in the science and literature of the age . . . what is more than all
the rest, is goodness itself,” They were married in Paris October
24, 1805.

“My dear child,” wrote the Count to his daughter, “this being
the first year’s anniversary of my marriage ... I am sorry to say
that experience only serves to confirm me in the belief that in
character and natural propensities Madame de Rumford and myself
are totally unalike, and never ought to have thought of marrying.
We are, besides, both too independent in our sentiments and habits
of life to live peaceably together— she having been mistress all her

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135

days of tier actions, and I, with no less liberty, leading for the most
part the life of a bachelor. Very likely she is as much disaffected
towards me as I am towards her. Little it matters with me, but I
call her a female dragon-simply by that gentle name! We have got
to the pitch of my insisting on one thing and she on another,”
Matters grew even worse. He did not like her parties, those large
open house affairs where Madame Lavoisier de Rumford (she re-
fused to drop the Lavoisier) ruled in queenly style over her own
hand-picked court of admirers. And when she poured boiling water
on his beautiful flowers in retaliation of some petty annoyance, he
declared that his habitation was no longer an abode of peace. “Lady
I cannot call her.” After four years of marital unpleasantness they
separated. Rumford said it was unavoidable; he could no longer
live with a person “who has given me so many proofs of her implaca-
ble hatred and malice.” He leased the villa at Auteuil and left her.

Rumford needed his wife. It is true he was miserable with her,
but without her he was a defeated man. She retained her friends,
kept her social contacts, entertained as usual, happily and gaily,
while Rumford, cut off, sank deeper each day into an engulfing
gloom. The distinguished French statesman Francois P. G. Guizot,
one of Madame Lavoisier’s most intimate friends, was astonished
at the transformation that had come over Rumford. When the
Count first courted her, “his spirit was lofty, his conversation was
full of interest, and his manners were marked by gentle kindness.
He made himself agreeable to Madame Lavoisier. He accorded
with her habits, her tastes, one might almost say with her remi-
niscences. . . . She married him, happy to offer to a distinguished
man a great fortune and a most agreeable existence.”

Toward the end of i8ii his daughter Sarah, Countess de Rum-
ford, joined him. It is not hard to understand why they did not
find a great deal of pleasure in each other’s company, for Rumford
was selfish and Sarah, after all, was a woman. Moreover, she had
been twice blocked in love by her father’s interference. Sarah
earnestly wished matrimony, and but for Rumford’s arrogance,
she would have been the wife of Sir Charles Blagden or Count
Taxis. She never married, and as the years went by she became
eccentric.'

Occasionally Madame Lavoisier visited them. While Rumford

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frequently declared, “I believe t/zaf woman was born to be the tor-
ment of my life,” Sarah, with a woman’s keener sense of appraisal,
had quite a different estimate. From her we learn that Madame
Lavoisier’s character was admirable. Their difficulties she ascribes
to too much independence and hypersensitivity: “One wanted this,
the other wanted that, Madame loved company, the Count loved
quiet.” And so on. Two extreme individualists tried to live under
one roof and could not make a go of it. Sarah’s point of view is
summed up in one very brief observation: “It was a fine match,
could they but have agreed.”

On August SI, 1814, after a brief illness which lasted only three
days. Count Rumford breathed his last. He was not an old man, not
quite sixty-two; yet into those years he had packed the experiences
and achievements of several ordinary lives. His knowledge of men
and nations, his command of many languages, his powers of imagi-
nation and creativity, his striking ability to put into operation dif-
ficult social, civic and military enterprises present to us, after the
passage of more than a hundred years, an immortal figure of sin-
gular impressiveness. History has sustained him.

In his death he did not forget America. He executed his last will
and testament in the presence of La Fayette, who was one of the wit-
nesses. After providing for his daughter he left an annuity to
Harvard, “for the purpose of founding ... a new institution and
professorship, in order to teach by regular courses of academical and
public Lectures, accompanied with proper experiments, the utility
of the physical and mathematical sciences for the improvement of
the useful arts, and for the extension of the industry, prosperity,
happiness and well-being of society.”

Upon the dethronement of the material theory of heat a new
era began, an era open for the acquisition of significant knowledge
which led to results greater than at any previous epoch in the his-
tory of man on earth. Under the new rule of the dynamical theory
of heat it only remained for the successors of Rumford and Davy
to enlarge the domains bequeathed to them.

The region of discovery proved rich beyond the power of con-
ception,,

RUMFGRD 13/7

Within less than a century there was erected the science of
thermodynamics. Once it became understood that mechanical energy
and heat are identical and convertible, the rest was comparatively
easy. Striking achievements came thick and fast, all to illustrate that
great practical consequences are bound to flow from correct views.
A host of men of various grades of genius carried the new science to
unbelievable heights-Sadi Carnot in France, Joule in England,
Helmholtz in Germany, not to forget Rankine, Clausius, Lord Kel-
vin and their co-workers.

But the supreme genius of them all was that peerless theorist,
Robert Mayer of Heilbronn.

In approaching the life and labors of Robert Mayer (1814-1878)
we are conscious of dealing with a wondrous field of knowledge
of which no previous generation had even the slightest inkling.
Under the genius of this thinker the new theory of heat was
elaborated in such a way as to show links and similarities where
people had imagined separation and differences. To perceive is
to see what we do not see— to grasp the subject as a whole, so that
greatly differing phenomena are understood as manifestations of one
principle. Truth of this sort is not easily come by, and in Mayer
we see a genius-theorist whose life was embittered by long years of
misunderstanding which almost ended in suicide.

There is a little town in Germany, not far from Heidelberg,
named Heilbronn. Here lived the young physician. Doctor Robert
Mayer, who in 1841 had just returned home to begin the practice
of medicine after having spent a year as ship’s physician on a Dutch
East India vessel. What Charles Darwin owed to the voyage of the
Beagle Robert Mayer was to owe to an experience on board the
Java which sailed from Holland to Batavia with a captain and crew
of twenty-eight.

Mayer noticed that the blood drawn from the arm of a patient
in the tropics was much brighter in color than that of an inhabitant
of a colder country. He pondered this seemingly insignificant fact,
recalling what Lavoisier had written about the relationship between
oxygen and heat— the physiological aspect of combustion. Consider-
ing the body as a machine, Mayer concluded that the cause of the

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138

brighter color of the blood was due to the lesser amount of oxida-
tion required to keep up the body temperature in the tropics.
“Heat produced mechanically by the organism,” he declared, “must
bear an invariable quantitative relation to the work expended in
producing it.” This conclusion led to a train of thinking that kept
Mayer busy on the subject of heat to the end of his days.

What started out in its embryonic stage as a vague intuition in
the brain of a ship’s doctor ended in the announcement of the
law of the conservation of energy, conceded to be the greatest
nineteenth century generalization in the domain of science. It is
amazing to think that Mayer’s initial interest in heat arose out of
this experience and that from it, unaided, he should have been
able to see that a definite relationship exists between the heat de-
veloped by mechanical action and the force which produced it.
Many months after his return to Heilbronn he wrote about this
lone experience on the Java in a letter to his friend Griesinger, the
neurologist. “I hung on the subject with such delighted interest,”
wrote Mayer, “that I— and many may laugh at me for this— asked
little concerning those far parts of the earth, but preferred to re-
main on board where I could work without interruption, and where
during many hours I felt so inspired that I can remember nothing
like it before or later. Certain lightning flashes of thought that went
through me— it was in the roadstead off Surabaya— were at once
eagerly followed up and led to new subjects. Those times are past,
but a quiet examination of what came to the surface in me at that
time has convinced me that it is a truth which is not only felt sub-
jectively but that can be proved objectively. The day will come, that
is certain, when these truths will become the common property of
science.”

The day did finally come when the world recognized Mayer,
but it came after long years of abuse and torture which led him
to an insane asylum, to brutal treatment, and finally, in a fit of
uncontrollable bitterness towards the injustice of the world, to an
attempt at suicide. What a contrast to the life of Rumford, whose
path led him into the high places of the world, to fame and early
recognition! No such good fortune came Mayer’s way. The first
significant paper that Mayer wrote was, sent to The Annals of
Physics and Chernistfy At It contained the great principles

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139

of the law of the conservation of energy: “motion, heat and elec-
tricity are phenomena which can be converted into one force, and
can be changed into one another under definite laws.” There was
also stressed the doctrine that energy, like matter, cannot be de-
stroyed or lost. This unique and priceless paper reached the editor
of The Annals, Professor Poggendorff, but Mayer did not receive
even the courtesy of an acknowledgment. After making several
fruitless inquiries, he was forced to let the matter drop. Many
years later, when Poggendorff died, Mayer’s paper was found in
an envelope among the professor’s effects, unopened and unread.

True, Rumford had arrived at correct views on the nature of heat
(which Mayer after long and careful thought accepted), but he did
not fully appreciate or understand that an exact quantitative rela-
tionship existed between the mechanical work expended (as when
the cannon was bored by horsepower) and the amount of heat
produced by such action. But Mayer did. And his comprehension
was the necessary element in the permanent foundation of the
completed theory. It was a rare achievement not only to be able
to follow out and check this relationship in its many and varied
aspects— organic and inorganic— but to understand its calculable
mathematical nature, a relationship imposed upon perception by an
act of the mind which is different from anything which our senses
directly offer us.

A year after the Poggendorff miscarriage there appeared in print
Mayer’s paper entitled The Forces of Inorganic Nature (1842).
Again he told about the conservation of energy: “A force once
in existence cannot be annihilated.” Mayer was familiar with vari-
ous kinds of forces— magnetic force, electrical force, chemical force,
the force of gravity. All these forces he saw gave rise to one and
the same thing which we now call energy. Whenever one of these
kinds of energy disappears, one of the others always appears in its
place. When heat appears during friction, it is because the energy
of motion has been transformed into heat.

This memorable paper of 1842 is remarkable in that it contains
the first calculation of the mechanical equivalent of heat, the
numerical relationship between heat and work. It grew out of a

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140

word of advice received from Doctor Norrenberg, professor of
physics at Tubingen, to whom Mayer went seeking counsel. “Yes,”
declared Norrenberg, “if you can base a new experiment on your
theory, then your case is established.” Mayer lost no time; he
returned home to experiment, to find out how much energy is
necessary to produce a unit of heat. Successfully arriving at the
coveted numerical relationship, he proved that the fall of a unit
of weight from a height of 365 meters is equal to the heating of
a like weight of water from 0° to 1° centigrade. It was a brilliant
and truly epoch-making achievement that interested nobody. The
world gave him indifference and drove him mad.

Chemistry has mostly to do with the transformations of matter;
physics with the transformations of energy. To Lavoisier we owe
the doctrine of the conservation of matter which teaches the impos-
sibility of either creating or destroying matter. Man can only rear-
range it. To Mayer we owe the doctrine of the conservation of
energy, which explains that energy is always changing from one
form to another, but none is ever lost. To illustrate this energy
law take a machine. Not quite so much work can be got out of
it as is originally put in. There is an apparent loss of a certain
amount of work because a machine while working develops heat
due to friction. Actually however, declared Mayer, the “loss” is
only apparent not real, for this certain amount of heat is the exact
equivalent in energy of the work which had been lost. Every experi-
ment that Mayer carried out proved conclusively that the heat
formed and the work lost were proportional to each other.

Just as matter exists in various forms so does energy; and energy
may be changed from one form to another in various transforma-
tions. So much energy of one kind produces so much energy of
another kind. There is, for example, mechanical energy, electrical
energy, heat energy, chemical energy— all capable of being trans-
formed one into the other in such a way that the quantitative value
always remains the same. A bank draft may be converted into notes,
gold, silver, or bullion, all interchangeable. In like manner there
exists a corelation of the different forms of energy mutually con-
vertible, Any form capable of producing another may reciprocally

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141

be produced by it; hence these forms of energy are known to be
mutually and constantly convertible.

The conservation of energy at first regarded from the point of
view of the reciprocal transformations between heat and work was
vastly extended in Mayer’s mind to cover the entire cosmos. One
need only glance through his essay Organic Motion (1845) to realize
how audaciously he advanced his energetics to embrace the most
varied phenomena which at first appear to have no connection with
each other. Here he tells how the sun pours out its vast solar energy,
how this energy is taken up by plant life which in turn supplies
the energy of food for the complex physiological processes of man
and animals. But solar energy is also stored in the earth in vast coal
beds which are the remains of ancient plant life. This coal can be
used for fuel, thereby releasing energy which can be transformed
into heat which supplies steam wherewith to generate electrical
energy which can be used for many purposes. Thus one form or
manifestation of energy generates another so as to bring together
into the same series of effects physical actions and changes seem-
ingly dissimilar. One form of energy disappears (is transformed)
as another is evolved. Thus energy is protean in its nature for it
may be converted directly or indirectly into any other form.

The existence of different forms of energy had been known for
centuries, but Mayer was the first to establish their essential identity
and interaction. This had not even been suspected. His achieve-
ment proved to be one of the grandest conquests of contemporary
thought. What were indefinite general notions in the minds of
other men became in Mayer’s a clear and certain piece of knowl-
edge. The forces of the universe were brought together into a unity,
and understood now as never before.

Mayer was a man whose intellectual fabrics were steeped and
dyed in the seething vat of his emotions. A little kindly encour-
agement, such as he received from Karl Baur and Justus Liebig,
elicited tremendous creative energies, whereas rudeness and indif-
ference tragically unbalanced his mind. It is unfortunate that his
work met with such little response in the early years of his life.
This in itself was enough to embitter him. What made matters

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142

infinitely worse, however, was the attempt later on to rob him of
his honors when the scientific world at long last finally awoke to
the significance of his discoveries.

James Prescott Joule of Manchester (a pupil of Dalton’s) and the
illustrious Professor Herman von Helmholtz of Berlin both
behaved unfairly toward Mayer; both claimed for themselves his
honors. It is true that Joule wrote a paper of unquestioned impor-
tance entitled The Calorific Effects of Magneto-Electricity and the
Mechanical Value of Heat, which was wonderful in its detailed
knowledge. Heat was long suspected of being a form of energy and
this was now verified. But Mayer had arrived at the mechanical
equivalent of heat before Joule. He justly resented Joule’s claims
to priority: “Mr. Joule had made no discoveries regarding heat
and energy without knowing mine. The numerous services of this
eminent physicist move me to the highest esteem. Nevertheless, I
believe I am within my rights when I repeat that I was the first
in 1842 to publish the law of the equivalence of heat and energy
as well as its numerical expression.”

Joule was never magnanimous enough to acknowledge Mayer’s
rights. He wrote a letter of disapproval to Professor John Tyndall
for acknowledging the greatness of Mayer. Tyndall replied: “I be-
lieve he deserves more praise than I have given him. It was he who
first used the term ‘equivalent’ in the precise sense in which you
have applied it; he calculated the mechanical equivalent of heat
from data which, as I have said, ‘a man of rare ingenuity alone
could turn to account,’ and his calculation is in striking accordance
with your own experimental determinations.”

With Helmholtz it was an even sadder case. Men of science like
to be thought devotees of truth uninfluenced by personal prejudice.
In an exalted mood a utopian dreamer once wrote: “The true man
of science worships but one god— truth. He despises the ecclesiastic
for teaching half-truths for the sake of moral influence; the poli-
tician for dressing up truth in a partisan guise; and the business
man .for subordinating truth to personal gain.” Splendid words!
But where is that marvelous abstraction “the true man of science”?
Science is a part of the universal biography of man and shares too
often, alas, the crude anthropomorphism of his life. How else can
one account for the petty hostility of Helmholtz, who sat in the seats

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of the mighty at Berlin begrudging Mayer recognition? There was
no fierce denial on Helmholtz’s part of Mayer’s great work-only
indifference and a desire to claim the discovery for himself. He too
had been working on the law of the conservation of energy; he
knew it was the greatest vivifying generalization since Lavoisier had
established the law of the conservation of matter. But it annoyed
him to think that it was conceived and worked out by an unknown
physician whom he chose to ignore. Helmholtz went so far as to
allow himself to be called the “father of the law of the conservation
of energy.”

Had it not been for the eminently fair-minded John Tyndall,
Mayer in all probability would have died without a word of recog-
nition. Tyndall literally came to the poor man’s rescue. In that
brilliant London lecture of June, 1862, he acknowledged the genius
of Mayer and called to the world’s attention the surpassing signifi-
cance of his work. It often happens that he who is stoned in one
country is enthroned in another. Mayer’s recognition in England
immediately spread to Germany. The man who was ignored by
his colleagues, flouted by his townsmen, tortured in an asylum by
morons, and actually declared dead by vicious gossip and news-
paper reports, came to life. High honors were now showered upon
him by governments and learned societies at home and abroad.
Even Helmholtz had finally to admit him as his equal. Mayer wrote
John Tyndall a touching letter of appreciation for calling the
attention of the world to the gross injustice of his case. “Your
kindness,” wrote Mayer, “impresses me all the more from the fact
of my having, for many years, been forced to habituate myself
to a precisely opposite mode of treatment.” A year later Tyn dall met
Mayer in Switzerland.

In the little town where he was bom this illustrious theorist
passed quietly away. His last years were long days of rest and peace
—and recognition, too. The King of Wiirttemberg ennobled him,
and in his hands were placed the Copley Medal and the Poncelet
Prize. Death came to him peacefully in his sixty-fourth year in the
month of March, 1878.

“Simplex Vert SigiiZum”— Simplicity is the Seal of Truth.*"

* The motto of one of Mayer’s books. ■ , , . , ^ ; , ; , ^

THEORY OF LIGHT

THE story o£ light, the discovery of its principles, its laws, and its
behavior, revolves around the names of a small group of uncom-
monly erudite men. After the passage of centuries, much of what
they thought still remains a part of the unshakable basis of our
modern knowledge. Theorists of light, they themselves are luminous
figures whose work has been undimmed by the passing of years.
And this despite cycles of revision and reformulation. They liter-
ally saxv light xvhile to other eyes all was yet darkness.

Not that people in all ages were not cognizant of this daily dis-
play of nature. They were. But they did not understand it. They
knew a few elementary things: that light streamed to the earth
principally from the sun, that it was reflected from polished sur-
faces such as metal mirrors, marble, glassware. They saw reflections
in the water, too; but beyond knowing that light travels in straight
lines their knoxvledge was fragmentary and absurdly limited. Phe-
nomena such as the rainbow, the aurora borealis, the shooting star,
the mirage were baffling mysteries. A great deal of outright super-
stition was connected with the appearance of comets, meteors, and
eclipses. During the fifteenth century a comet made its appearance
at the time when the Turks were fighting the Christians. In keep-
ing with medieval ideas Pope Calixtus III decreed several days of
prayer for averting the divine anger: “From the Turk and the
comet, good Lord, deliver us!”— so ran the litany. As comets were
believed to be fire balls flung from God’s angry hands, so eclipses
were equally ominous as tokens of some terrible trouble about
to happen.

The emancipation of the human mind from grotesque medieval
ideas about light and related subjects developed very slowly. No
thinker can be credited with more careful spadework than Chris-

HUYGENS

tiaan Huygens, the so-called “Dutch Archimedes,” whose Treatise
on ivigAt, published in Leyden in 1690, remains one of the classics
of science.

Huygens was born in the Hague in 1629, just three years before
Spinoza was born in Amsterdam. He came of an old aristocratic
Dutch family of wealth and distinction. His father, Sir Constantijn
Huygens, was the grand seigneur of Dutch culture and an influential
statesman. Foi his son he had marked out a literary and diplomatic
career; but the early and extraordinary exhibitions of talent in
mathematics and the sciences indicated the direction into which
the future theorist would turn his abilities.

After attending the Universities of Leyden and Breda, he went
to Denmark for a brief visit in the retinue of Henry, Count of
Nassau. On his return the youthful Huygens gave himself over to
a detailed consideration of the problems of mathematics and astron-
omy. His early essays on these subjects, wntten when he was only
twenty-two years old, evoked enthusiastic praise from Rene Descartes
who saw in them evidences of the greatness that was to follow.

The prodigious mental vitality that characterized the youth of
Huygens never forsook him. To his last breath he was a man of
plans, inventions, and ideas. After startling Descartes in mathe-
matics, he turned his attention to the advancement of astronomical
knowledge, but he was hampered by poor equipment. Thereupon
he promptly devised ways in which to improve telescopes and clocks,
so that he became the world’s greatest authority on these subjects.
Then he turned to the problem of manufacturing better lenses,
and hit upon new methods of grinding and polishing. Out of these
improvements came his famous discovery of the rings of Saturn.

Recognition of his abilities was not by any means wanting.
Spinoza, who was a lens-grinder, found a common bond with this
man, still in his thirties, who knew so much about the world and
all things in it. They appear to have met with some frequency
up until Huygens began to travel. He went to France to receive
from the University of Angiers an honorary degree. On the occa-
sion of his second trip to England in 1663 the Royal Society elected
him a Fellow. Such distinguished honors brought him world recog-
nition. To crown it all, King Louis XIV, the Grand Monarch,
invited him to live in Paris and become a member of the newly

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organized French Academy of Sciences with the promise of a large
stipend and many advantages. Huygens accepted.

It was here in the seclusion of the Bibliotheque du Roi that the
Dutch philosopher spent fifteen years in study, experimenting,
inventing, writing, and theorizing. These were the great productive
years that witnessed the development of several mechanical inven-
tions, including the pendulum-clock (an honor which he shares in
part with Galileo), and the writing in 1673 of that remarkable
treatise called Horologium Oscillatorium, in which he worked out
the mechanics of the pendulum. This treatise Huygens dedicated
to his royal patron. Isaac Newton in England read it and was so
profoundly influenced by its concluding pages that it is not too much
to say that the greatness of Newton’s Principia finds its prelude in
this work.

The remarkable thing about Huygens is that he had a mind
that could voyage alone and unaided through strange seas of
thought. He is one of the pre-eminently versatile thinkers of all
time, a man who made lasting contributions to the sciences of
mathematics, astronomy, optics, and physics— demonstrating an
exceptional combination of mathematical power and practical
ingenuity. He invented the micrometer (an instrument for the
precise measurement of minute distances), the pendulum-clock, the
spiral watch spring, improved the air pump and was among the
first to discover the phenomena of the polarization of light. But that
is not all. He constructed unusually powerful telescopes, developed
lenses, and devised an almost perfect achromatic eyepiece, which
still bears his name.

Then toward the end of his career he wrote in Latin a remark-
able little book, published posthumously, which he called Cosmo-
theros. It was translated into English under the title: The Celestial
Worlds Discovered Or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants,
Plants and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets. It is fanciful,
and a delight to read. Here is the real precursor of Jules Verne
and H. G. Wells. And yet what a new range of possibilities such
conjectures brought to the scientific imagination and daring of that
early day! After the long and dreary winter of the Dark Ages, the
liberated spirit of man needed just such thoughts as Huygens gave

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I4f

it, in order to sense the vastness and yet the interrelatedness of the
universe. His views stimulated the rising intellect of the time, turn-
ing science into the channels of rapid growth and boundless

aspiration.

It is easy to understand how an astronomer would inevitably

come to grips with the subject of light. The stars in their courses
blinked from their immense distances-what was the nature of
their light? And the light of the moon? And above all the light
of day issuing from the sun? This Dutch scientist, at work iti Paris,
answered these questions and, out of it all, he evolved the wave
theory of light.

Perhaps some brief comment ought to be made here on the
theory of probability and Huygens’ relationship to it. A bowing
acquaintance with it will be of great help later on when a modern
scientist like Heisenberg stresses the principle of indeterminism.
Perhaps it seems a long way from the subject of light to the mathe-
matical theory of probability. Yet in this world of speculations one
must always be prepared for a strange inbreeding of ideas.

A pioneer contribution was made to the theory of probability
by Huygens in a small pamphlet published in Leyden in 1657.
It was the first attempt at a systematic treatment of a subject that
had an unsavory beginning nearly four centuries ago in the activi-
ties of a professional gambler, Chevalier de Mere. The purpose of
the theory is, of course, to enable the scientist to deal with cases
involving a very large number of possible events. Every insurance
company in the world bases its operations not on the life of any one
man but on probability applied to large numbers. So many thou-
sand people die of certain diseases each year, at certain ages, and
in certain trades or professions. It is on the basis of these studies
that insurance policies are written. In many fields where statistics
are used, probability enters into the situation with tremendous
importance as a powerful aid to investigation and analysis. Later
on in this chapter it will be seen how heavily the modern scientist
in dealing with the quantum theory leans upon “probability
concepts” in order to understand the , fundamental nature of the
universe. It is now an inescapable fact (repugnant, indeed, to a
great many people) that quantitative science is at bottom a situa-

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148

tion ruled by probabilities— by the goddess of chance just as she
rules at Monte Carlo. One of the fundamental considerations now
uppermost in science today is that all data is of necessity proba-
bility data.

Huygens’ insight into probability vaguely foreshadowed this.

With solid achievements in science already attesting his genius,
this gifted thinker was now prepared to frame his theory of light.
From his earliest days as an astronomer he had studied this phe-
nomenon and now he was ready to tell the world about it. Not
all about it. Only as much as he felt sure of; for Huygens was a
modest man, and he well realized how much research remained
to be done before the subject could be fully understood. Yet he
knew that his wave theory of light was essentially correct, and that
it could be given to the world in anticipation of much that would
be discovered by future scientists. All these thoughts he set forth
in a brief essay begun in 1678 but actually not published until
1690. He called it Traite de la Lumiere— Treatise on Light.

Huygens’ preface to this brief essay is a charming bit of writing.
“If in the following treatise,” he says, “all these evidences of proba-
bility are present, as it seems to me they are, the correctness of
my conclusions will be confirmed; and indeed it is scarcely possible
that these matters differ very widely from the picture I have drawn
of them. ... I trust also there will be some who, from such begin-
nings, will push these investigations, far in advance of what I have
been able to do; for the subject is not one which is easily exhausted.
. . . Finally, there is much more to be learned by investigation
concerning the nature of light than I have yet discovered; and I
shall be greatly indebted to those who, in the future, shall furnish
what is needed to complete my imperfect knowledge.” Here is the
modesty that makes science truly great.

The essence of the message contained in the famous Traite de
la Lumiere is that light, like sound, is essentially a form of wave
motion. For a long time it had been known that sound was con-
veyed in waves through air. When, for example, a bell is struck its
vibration is communicated to the surrounding air. Because of the
elasticity of air this vibrational energy is swiftly carried in the form

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of waves to regions more and more remote. Like a stone dropped
into a quiet pool of water, sound waves spread out from the center
of the disturbance in ever-widening circles. Gradually, of course
they decrease in amplitude and die out. Now, in order to explain
light as a wave form, Huygens had to postulate the existence of a
medmm through which light could act. For how could light come^
to die earth in the form of waves without some medium throuo-h
which these waves could travel? This medium Huygens called the
ether.

Ether is not air. Air exists only in very limited quantities, appar-
ently not at all in the vast depdis of interstellar space through
whicn light must travel. Then again, air could not possibly be
the transmitting agent, for light is capable of passing through a
vacuum. (Sound waves however cannot be transmitted through a
vacuum.) Ether is therefore something supersensible; it cannot be
seen or weighed or isolated. It pervades all space throughout the
universe and permeates all material things.

This in brief is Huygens’ theory; and it is not to be wondered
that, despite its explanation of the phenomena of reflection and
refraction, it was not immediately accepted. After all, no one can
see a light wave, any more than one can see an atom. So much of
Jbeory is in the realm of the invisible. The word theory (compare
it with the word theater') means to see; it is the supreme co-ordinat-
ing act of the mind. As the mental process involved in a scientific
^neralization is not easy, it can readily be understood that the
simplest and most familiar explanations are always the most quickly
believed.

It was not because a light wave is invisible that Isaac Newton
(1642-1727) repudiated Huygens’ theory. He fought it on other
grounds, and came to the conclusion that light is not a wave form
at all, but a stream of minute particles, like a flight of arrows,
emitted from the source of luminosity (sun, moon, stars, etc.). New-
ton s theory is therefore known as the corpuscular theory of light.

What led Newton to disagree with Huygens is the fact that sound
(also a wave phenomenon) can bend around corners, while light
is propagated in straight lines. On the basis of his own corpuscular
theory, Newton found that he could more easily account for recti-

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150

linear propagation. If light consists of waves (as sound consists of
waves), then luminous objects should be visible— Newton argued—
even when an obstacle is between them and the eye, just as sounds
are heard even though a dense body may be placed between them
and one’s ear. If light waves, unlike sound waves, do not bend,
then why not abandon the whole wave-concept and regard light as
streams of exceedingly minute corpuscles which fly through the air
with inconceivable swiftness? Furthermore, Newton regarded the
ether-concept as something superfluous and not to be reconciled
with his celestial mechanics which showed no signs of resistance due
to a medium filling all space.

In 1704 Newton published his Optics. He had been professor at
Cambridge and was now in the full zenith of his powers— Member
of Parliament, Warden of the Mint of England, and a great favorite
at court. His pronouncements in science were regarded with awe.
To question Newton was to question the dominating scientific per-
sonality of the world. By the weight of his great authority the cor-
puscular theory of light ruled for a hundred years. It was the “Age
of Newton.”

But accumulated knowledge refused to adjust itself to Newton’s
particle theory. That it would have to be overthrown was evident
to several thinkers. Newton’s theory, for example, led to the con-
clusion that velocity of light in air must be less than the velocity
through a transparent medium such as glass or a liquid. But just
the very opposite was eventually proved true. At first thought, it
would seem unbelievable that Newton should have advocated such
a view. But to Newton it was not absurd, for he reasoned like this:
a beam of light is made up of particles, therefore they are subject
to the attraction of gravitation; therefore when light approaches a
more dense medium the increased attraction should hasten its speed.
And it was not until 1850 that the French investigator J. B. L.
Foucault was able to demonstrate conclusively to the satisfaction
of the scientific world that the velocity was less in water than in air.

llliiiliilfll

i ; The man who did more than any other person to overthrow
Newton’s views and establish the truth of Huygens’ conception was
a young Quaker physician who was just beginning the practice of

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151

medicine in London at the time Rumford was establishing the
Royal Institution. It was in 1801 that Doctor Thomas Young (they
called him “Phenomenon Young” at Cambridge) took up the fight
against Newton. In that year he delivered a lecture entitled The
Theory of Light and Colors before the members of the Royal
Society and staunchly declared that light is not a particle but a
wave form, a pulsation in the all-pervading ether, just as sound is
a pulsation in the air. This declaration against Newton was based
upon very careful experiments dealing with the subject of inter-
ference.

Take, for example, just such a simple problem as this. In certain
circumstances light meeting light results in darkness at certain
points, and double illumination at points in between. Even a school-
boy who sees such an experiment performed for the first time asks:
How does it happen? Young answered that light is a wavelike proc-
ess, and waves always and everywhere lead to so-called interference.
By a tremendously important experiment Young showed that two
beams of light incident upon a single point can be added together
to produce darkness at that point. The explanation to him was as
simple as it was obvious, namely, that two light waves can meet so
that the crest of one combines with the trough of another. When
that happens the entire wave is destroyed and darkness results. Why?
Because the waves have annulled (interfered with) each other.

Many of the experiments which Young undertook were beyond
the capacity of Huygens. It must be remembered that a full cen-
tury had intervened between them, with increasingly better scien-
tific methods and more instruments of precision, so that Young
became the first of those men of the future who Huygens prophe-
sied in 1690 would arise to “furnish what is needed to complete
my imperfect knowledge.” It was the ability of the wave theory to
give a satisfactory explanation of interference that turned the scale
against Newton’s corpuscular views.

There is much in the mental stature of Young that reminds one
of Huygens. Like his Dutch predecessor. Young was a child genius.
At the age of two it is said that he w;as able to read fluently. At
six he learned by heart tlie whole of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village.

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152

His was a remarkable memory, combined with a rare aptitude for
learning the most amazing variety of things. Before he reached his
fourth birthday he had read the Bible twice from Genesis to Revela-
tion and had begun to take an interest in languages. His early
mastery of more than a dozen tongues, including Arabic, Persian,
and Ethiopic, eventually led to his interest in archaeology and
a partial decipherment of the ^Rosetta Stone.* From his ability to
read Egyptian hieroglyphics came the enormous scientific interest
in digging up the records of man’s prehistoric past.

Like Huygens, Young entered into manifold fields of thought-
mathematics, botany, literature, painting and philosophy. Before he
was twenty-one he had produced a work on the eye which resulted
in his election to the Royal Society. In addition to this, he was an
excellent physician, an accomplished musician, a recognized art
critic and a splendid atiilete. The full list of his accomplishments
seems incredibly fantastic. He could turn his mind on the subject
of tides and write a learned treatise about it, and at the same time
illuminate problems in navigation; then he could fulfill the request
of an important insurance company seeking extensive actuarial
studies. Such a supreme exhibition of mental power in the life
of one person gives some evidence of hope for the race of man.

What was clear in the co-ordinating mind of Thomas Young
was far from acceptable to his contemporaries. The renowned Mar-
quis de Laplace, known as the “Jupiter Olympus” of the French
Academy, was particularly bitter in his opposition. Youttg was
distressed that one so eminent in science should disregard the facts
in the case and use his influence to block progress. Truth is seldom
born without the pains of parturition. Confronted by phenomena
and explanations that are unpalatable, most men immediately de-

*This Stone was found by the French in 1798 near the mouth of the Nile
and passed, by treaty, into British hands. For a long time most people believed
that Champollion (1790-1832), the French archeaologist, deserved sole credit for
having been the first man to decipher this important record. Actually, however,
Champollion based his readings in part upon the discoveries of Young and then
claimed for himself aE honors. The Rosetta Stone is now in the British Museum

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153

dare the new inadmissible and therefore feel safe in rejecting it
without examination. It is hard to believe that this serene aesthetic
student of nature could actually have aroused a hostile controversial
spirit over the truth of his ideas. And yet that is exactly what
happened.

Unable to understand the far-reaching nature of Young’s work.
Lord Brougham, editor of the Edinburgh Review, undertook to
ridicule him. Brougham was vicious in his attack, asserting that he
could not find in Young’s scientific papers anything “which deserves
the name either of experiment or discovery.” In fact. Brougham
deemed them “destitute of every species of merit,” and thereupon
took the Royal Society to task for its stupidity in printing such
“paltry and unsubstantial papers.” Of course (and here is the trag-
edy) few people could read Young’s scientific document, but they
could and did read the Edinburgh Review. Sidney Smith once
remarked that Lord Brougham had discovered, in the course of
his editorship of that paper, two important things: first that Byron
was no poet and second that Young was no scientist.

Oftentimes a great mind comes too soon. The age in which he
lives is not prepared for him. The philosopher Kant is reported
to have said to Stagemann in 1797: “I have come too soon; after
a hundred years people will begin to understand me rightly, and
will then study my books anew and appreciate them.” Robert
Mayer felt exactly that way about his work and so did Gregor
Mendel. Young realized that the prestige of Newton was too firmly
rooted for men to give his ideas a fair hearing. He knew he would
have to bide his time. “He was one of the most clear-sighted men
who ever lived,” once declared Helmholtz in a tribute to Young,
“but he had the misfortune to be too greatly superior in sagacity
to his contemporaries. They gazed on him with astonishment, but
could not always follow the bold flight of his intellect, and thus a
multitude of his most important ideas lay buried and forgotten
in the great tomes of the Royal Society of London, till a later gen-
eration in tardy advance remade his discoveries and convinced itself
of the accuracy and force of his inferences.”

architects of ideas

Progress is always by stages, each advance being one step at a time.
In 1815 a young French military engineer, Augustin Jean Fresnel
(1788-1827), became interested in the subject of light. Unaided and
quite unaware that his experiments on interference had been antici-
pated by Doctor Young, Fresnel communicated his results to the
French Academy, supposing them to be absolutely novel. Luckily
his papers fell into the hands of that fine soul, Dominique Francois
Arago\ 1786- 1853), who headed the committee to which Fresnel’s
papers had been referred. Like Descartes, who recognized the bril-
liant work of the youthful Huygens, Arago was thrilled by Fresnel’s
achievements “which appear to be destined,’’ he declared, “to make
an epoch in science.’’ Here was a young man who achieved much in
the gathering and crowding details of a vast subject.

Arago told Fresnel that he had been anticipated by Doctor Young
of London, but asked him to continue his researches on light
because so much remained to be accomplished. He congratulated
Fresnel on discovering independently and fully proving the ideas
established fourteen years previously by the learned British physi-
cian. Then to show Fresnel that his words were no mere empty
sounds, he generously offered to help him, suggesting that the two
of them be associated in the furtherance of future experiments.

Research is search. It is a search for new ideas and an examina-
tion of the validity of those already advanced. This Fresnel did.
It was in order to explain the phenomena of polarization that he
introduced the idea of transverse vibrations in the ether. It is true
that Doctor Young simultaneously arrived at the same idea. But
Fresnel, by his greater mathematical ability, carried this joint dis-
covery to tremendous heights. He found that light waves are not
longitudinal, like sound waves, but definitely transverse like waves
on the sea. By the union of Huygens’ clear conception of the wave
form (especially the wave front as the envelope of an infinite num-
ber of elementary waves) with Young’s principle of interference,
Fresnel gave the first satisfactory explanation of rectilinear propa-
gation of light. Newton’s prime objections were now answered.

Arago brought Fresnel’s papers to the attention of his colleagues
at the Academy, together with his own personal endorsement of

HUYGENS

their truth and value. At once a bitter controversy broke out, led
by Laplace, Poisson and Biot. The opposition raged for several
years and yielded only after hostility gave way to reason.

Despite neglect and opposition from the intellectual giants of the
Academy, Fresnel followed his own course. Doctor Young was par-
ticularly pleased with the progress this eager Frenchman was making
and cheered him on. Finally, in 1823 the opposition weakened and
bowed to the profound mathematical insight and experimental
resourcefulness of the engineer whom they had belittled. Fresnel
was elected a member of the Academy,

And now came further recognition. Through the efforts of Doctor
Young, Fresnel was voted the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society
in 1825, ^tid two years later he was chosen to be one of its hon-
orary foreign members. It fell to the lot of Young, as Foreign Secre-
tary of the Royal Society, to inform Fresnel of these distinguished
honors. To add still greater satisfaction to this turn of events, it
now fell to Arago, as secretary of the French Academy, to notify
Doctor Young that he had been honored by the savants across the
channel.

The wave theory and its champions had come into their own.

Following the death of these three exponents of light-Young,
Fresnel, and Arago-the wave theory moved on to splendid con-
quests and remarkable confirmation. As new discoveries in light
were made, as the phenomena became more various and complex,
the wave theory grew in stature and acceptance. It accounted for
and explained an increasing number of significant observations and
experiments. Especially after the work of Foucault on the velocity
of light, the cumulative evidence against the corpuscular theory
was so overwhelming as to confirm the wave form concepts. All
in all, it proved to be a great victory for Huygens, even though it
took fully two centuries to consummate the triumphr

The immediate effect of Fresnel’s work was to focus the atten-
tion of the scientific world upon the ether, that universal medium
for the transmission of light wliich Huygens had assumed and

156

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Young had adopted as a necessary part of the wave theory. Fresnel’s

brilliant matliematical demonstrations on light, coupled with his

belief in the ether xvith its strange and paradoxical characteristics,
drew a group of noted investigators into this intriguing field.

One of these was Michael Faraday (1791-1867), who, at the age
of twenty-two, became an assistant to Humphry Davy at the Royal
Institution and immediately entered upon a triple career of dis-
coverer, experimenter and theorist. His researches on electricity
and magnetism brought him face to face with the question of a
universal medium through which these phenomena express them-
selves and convey their forces from one point to another. He
brooded over these ideas until there dawned upon him the one big
concept that co-ordinated all the lesser ones. It was this: that the
phenomena of magnetism and electric induction indicate that there
must be an invisible universal medium everywhere in space and that
this medium is very probably the same that transmits the waves of
light. In other words one ether is concerned in the transmission of
all these phenomena. Faraday demonstrated that electricity, mag-
netism and light are, in some way, intimately interrelated. Just how
he did not know.

But others followed Faraday who made it their supreme business
to know. And now rve turn to those personalities whose researches
constitute the most penetrating attack man has yet made into the
delicate and minute secrets of nature. “The world little knows,”
once declared Faraday, “how many of the thoughts and theories
which have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator have
been crushed in silence and secrecy by his own severe criticism and
adverse examination; that in the most successful instances not a
tenth of the suggestions, the hopes, the wishes, the preliminary con-
clusions have been realized.”

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) began where Faraday ended,
not all at once but by gradual degrees of approach. He was bom
to wealth in Scotland and early trained in scientific subjects. It
was especially in mathematics (the subject in which Faraday was
weak) that Maxwell was overwhelmingly brilliant,
r) Profeimdly impressed with Faraday’s unusual views. Maxwell was

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determined to master completely his predecessor’s ideas. He became
convinced that those strange flashes of Faraday’s mind were not
whimsies but significant insights, faint stirrings toward the next
steps that Maxwell was now destined to take. Maxwell set himself
to the task of converting into exact terminology many of Faraday’s
observations. By superb mathematical analysis, he was able to prove
that electromagnetic disturbances and waves of light are transmitted
by one and the same medium and with the same velocity. In fact,
the only difference between electromagnetic waves and light waves
is that light waves are shorter. In their fundamental nature all forms
of wave radiation, radiant heat. X-rays, gamma rays emitted by ra-
dium, ultra-violet rays used therapeutically are the same. Maxwell
formulated a celebrated equation of the electromagnetic field which
applied to light no less than to electromagnetism. In other words,
he did not hesitate to declare that light waves are short electro-
magnetic waves. This led Maxwell to announce to the world in 1873
the electromagnetic theory of light, in which light is regarded as an
electrical phenomenon in the nature of a transverse vibration in the
ether.*

Maxwell’s development of the wave theory proved to be a line
of thought productive of astonishing energy and foresight. As a
result of his efforts, the story of the wave now becomes the story
of a steady advance from point to point with tremendous practical
results. The history of science does not present a more bountiful
flowering of achievements than emerged from Maxwell’s theory.

See what happened:

Maxwell declared that his electromagnetic theory of light im-
plied the possibility of producing waves of a similar sort, but longer
than could be seen by the eye. Nine years after Maxwell’s death,

* No concept in the history of science has had a stranger or more checkered
career than the concept of ether. Nor has any concept been more the subject of
bitter controversy. It has been killed and revived numerous times, especially
since the days of Huygens. Even its bitterest enemies recognize that it has played
a helpful role in the development of science. Einstein, however, in the main,
threw it overboard and thereby opened the way to his discovery of the special
theory of relativity. Looking at the work of Maxwell from our more modern
vantage ground, it can be said that Maxwell’s results remain even though the
picture underlying electromagnetic phenomena is destroyed. Nevertheless, Ed-
dington in his The Nature of the Physical World “We need the ether.”

1^8 architects OF IDEAS

his prophetic prediction came true in Germany through the efiEorts
of Heinrich Rudolph Hertz (1857-1894), in the course of new ex-
periments on electromagiietic waves. Hertz was unquestionably the
first man to demonstrate the existence of electric waves. He showed
that light and electricity possess the same wave properties, the dif-
ference being one of length-that is, the rate of vibration of the
ether. Moreover, Hertz discovered the means of increasing the
amplitude of these waves, which are now called in his honor
Hertzian waves (that is, radio waves).

Then came Marconi (1874-1937), who saw that these Hertzian
waves might be put to practical use. He adapted them to a system
of telegraphy, and in 1896 (at the age of twenty-two) took out his
first patent for wireless based on the use of electric waves. His suc-
cess in transmitting messages startled the world, for it was at first
incredible that such a practical “wonder” could be realized out of
the realms of theory. In 1900 Marconi used these words in which he
acknowledged the work of his predecessor; “The experimental proof
of Hertz, thirteen years ago, of the identity of light and electricity,
and the knowledge of how to produce, and how to detect, these ether
waves, the existence of which had been so far unknown, made pos-
sible wireless telegraphy.”

The romance of science is no fiction. Out of the highly theoretical
work of Maxwell came another triumph— radio. Those dry and for-
bidding equations of this Scottish physicist now bring voices out of
the ether pulsating from station to station round the world. But
perhaps the most sensational result to date of Maxwell’s unification
of light and electricity is television.

At the turn of the century Doctor Max Planck (1858- ), pro-

fessor of theoretical physics in the University of Berlin, gave to the
world the quantum theory. While dealing with the many complex
aspects of energy, this theory has a great deal to say about the nature
of light, which is also a form of energy. Planck’s theory is in itself
a generalization independent of classical physics, and its success has
led to new knowledge already fruitful of profound consequences.

The important tiling about the quantum theory is that Planck
insisted that energy is granular in its structure, just as Dalton

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159

insisted that matter is atomic^ Planck claimed that all energy is
emitted not in a continuous flow, but in tiny bundles called quanta,
the energy of which depends upon the wave length. Thus all energy
is emitted and received in definite individual proportions or
“quanta”-wise, just as the chemical elements occur “atom”-wise.

Planck’s thought applied to light means that it too is atomic and
discontinuous, just as matter is. A beam of light leaving its source
is in reality a stream of small entities (quanta). There is associated
with each light-quantum a certain amount of energy and a certain
velocity and momentum, just as we associate these concepts with a
bullet or cannonball.

Does the quantum theory therefore mean that Newton was not
wrong after all? Does it hold that light is essentially corpuscular
in its nature, and that Huygens, Young, Fresnel and Maxwell were
not altogether right in their wave contention?

Yes, it does!

There is no denying that Planck’s theory has been greatly
strengthened in the broad fields of physics. The experiments of the
last twenty years have added enormously to its prestige and influ-
ence. Planck received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1919. Together
with Einstein he has headed the greatest revolt in modern science.

But the quantum theory cannot, like the classical theory of con-
tinuous waves, explain easily and naturally the facts of diffraction
and other phenomena due to the interference of light. Having re-
vived corpuscular ideas, which were admittedly dead for a whole
century, the quantum theory has caused a peculiar impasse. Here
then are two theories, each surprisingly successful in explaining a
variety of phenomena, yet presenting two distinct pictures of light:
a particle-picture and a wave-picture.

Since 1926 (the date which marks the rise of the school of wave-
mechanics) experiment, debate, and investigation touching the dual
aspect of light have been extended to the entire domain of nature.
Men like Louis de Broglie, Erwin Schroedinger, Werner Heisenberg
are the wizards in this new development. We met these men in the
concluding paragraphs of the chapter on John Dalton, and here we
meet them again, for they are pioneering in incredible truth on the
remote frontiers of the universe.

l6o ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

As a result of wave-mechanics, we are stepping into a new and
different kind of an order, quite unlike that which we were taught
to believe under the discipline of the older concepts of physics,
but nonetheless a rational order capable of mathematical formu-
lation. For example, the classical notion of cause and effect (the
principle of causality) has had to yield in these days to probability.
More refined measurements, instruments of greater precision, have
forced this change. And it is a revolutionary one at that. To deny
the universal validity of the principle of causality (which means
tliat under like circumstances, like results will follow) is to strike
at the very roots of science as humanity has known it since the days
of Galileo and Newton. Yet this is exactly what has happened. In
its stead, the quantum-wave-mechanics has placed its reliance on
statistical averages (probability). Causality as a dogma, however,
is so deeply entrenched that it will be a long time before people
will accustom themselves to think in these newer probability terms.

The purpose of theory is to give us a view of the whole in the
truest sense of the word. But the new abstruseness is such that it
leaves the mind of the average man more than a little bewildered.
It is true that the latest advances of science, bound up with a terrify-
ing revision of the facts, make our understanding of the universe
not easier but harder. Yet those who stand on the sidelines, and can
only touch these subjects with padded fingers, ought to rejoice in
the challenge of new ideas and not protest against them. “Men are
not animals erect,” said Francis Bacon, “but immortal gods.” See
how the theorist approaches his facts. He has no ready-made scheme
in his hands, nor does he attempt to force facts by Procrustean
torture to conform to an arbitrary situation. He does not distort the
facts or throw them away in disgust because they are too hard. On
the contrary, he rejoices in their complexity; and despite their
seemingly incomprehensible bulk and endless detail he finds satis-
faction in attacking the problems of the universe with man’s growing
capacity for penetration.

In disdain of these newer and upsetting advances in science,
someone composed a satirical quatrain:

HUYGENS l6l

“Little by little we subtract
Faith and Fallacy from Fact,

The Illusory from the True,

And starve upon the residue.”

But the main thing is that man has not starved! The abundance of
the world is the achievement of science alone— against the fallacious
and the illusory. By revealing the nature of the xvorld around us,
men of science have given a new curve to hope and to the increas-
ing wealth and happiness of nations. “Primitive man,” declared
Frederick Soddy in keen appraisal, “actually froze on the site of
what are now coal mines, and starved within the sound of water-
falls that now are working to provide our food.”

Essentially, the scientific mood is a seeking after clearness, a
dislike of blurred vision and obscurities. Yet modern science con-
forms neither wholly to the corpuscular theory nor wholly to the
wave theory. Up to the present no one has bridged them. Appar-
ently, the two theories throw light upon two quite different aspects
of nature, and as such may be compared to two different languages
for deciphering the same problem. As Sir William Bragg so well
expressed it in his presidential address to the British Association in
1928 at Glasgow: “On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we adopt
one hypothesis, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays the other.
We know that we cannot be seeing clearly and fully in either case
but are perfectly content to work and wait for complete under-
standing.”

It now appears that both Newton and Huygens are right; that
the entities which the author of the Optics considered corpuscular
may under circumstances behave like waves. And this dual nature
is not only true of light but of every atom in the universe.

Among themselves the early pioneers in science tore up the
foundations of the comfortable little old static world in which they
lived. To us they have bequeathed a vast, restless dynamic universe
whose ultimate nature consists of something which must be de-
scribed partly in terms of waves and partly in terms of particles,
and governed by the laws of probability— a certain element of pure

i68 ' ■ , ARCHITEGTS OF IDEAS .

chance intrinsic, in the very striictnre of the atom, .The real world
apparently, is so unimaginable, unpictiirable, in terms of what we
know, tliat, it may .forever be beyond the grasp of the .huinaii mind.
Just how to get at the inscrutable hiddenness and unity of nature
is a staggering problem.

Do you remember Alice in Through the Looking Glass? ''She
went on and on, a long way, .but wherever the road divided there
were sure to be two finger posts, pointing to the same way. One
marked to tweedledum.^s house, and the other 'to the house of
TWEEDLEDEE.’ 1 do believe/ said Alice at last, 'that they live in the
same house!' I' wonder I never thought of that before/

7. MalthuS . THEORY OF POPULATION

IN 1798 when Malthus was thirty-two years old, there was published
anonymously An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects
the future improvement of Society: with remarks on the speculations
of Mr. Godwin, M. Condor cet, and other writers. The intellectu-
ally wide-awake world took an immediate and passionate interest
in it. Overnight it was a sensation and instantly recognized as a
significant piece of writing.

Here was a bold and brilliant treatise that did not shrink from
the risk of sailing in uncharted seas, nor did it fear to touch strange
and unfamiliar shores. Not every man is able to leap from a float-
ing island of conjecture to a continent of fact. Did the author
of this Essay do it? Some said “Yes”— definitely, unmistakably.
Others said “No” with loud and angry insistence. No one was more
surprised than Malthus himself at the storm which instantly raged
about his theory. The notable reception which greeted his ideas,
debatable in the extreme, made the author increasingly conscious
of their vast significance.

Very quickly people learned that the anonymous essay was the
work of a minister, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, curate
at Albury in Surrey. He was the second son of Daniel Malthus, a
liberal-minded, independent, small landowner, who had been the
friend of David Hume, the philosopher, and of that eminent
French thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau who visited the Malthus
home in March, 1766.

The theorist-to-be was reared in an atmosphere of culture and
refinement in a “small elegant mansion” near Dorking known by
the name of Chert-gate Farm (also as “The Rookery”), surrounded
by beautiful country of hills and dalei water and wood. It was here

164 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

on February 13, iy66, that Thomas Robert Malthus was born.
Three weeks later, Hume and Rousseau called together and, like
tlie Wise Men of old, paid the babe a visit in his nursery.

What early education Malthus received was given to him by his
father, who took a keen interest in this boy of rare promise. And
partly too by private tutors who continued the intellectual stimu-
lation his father had initiated. No course of study was more calcu-
lated to make a young man think for himself than the private
tuition he received from Gilbert Wakefield, an heretical clergy-
man, who was described as “wild, restless and paradoxical in many
of his opinions, a prompt and hardy disputant.” Wakefield’s views
were in accord with the advanced ideas of Rousseau’s Emile. The
unorthodox minister held that “the greatest service of tuition to
any youth is to teach him the exercise of His own powers, to con-
duct him to the hill of knowledge by that gradual process in
which he sees and secures his own way, and rejoices in a conscious-
ness of his own faculties and his own proficiency.”

From Wakefield’s excellent tuition, young Malthus went on to
Cambridge where he found himself in the center of a small group
of brilliant students. The years he spent there (1785-1796) were
fruitful, full of study, discussion, and unending conversation. By
1788 he had taken holy orders, and after 1796 he divided his time
betw'een Cambridge and a curacy at Albury.

In 1793 intelligent Englishmen were reading and discussing a
new book entitled An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and
its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness written by a philo-
sophic radical, William Godwin (1756-1836). Godwin, who had
been in the ministry, was deeply interested in the regeneration of
society. With a new and almost fanatical evangelistic zeal he wrote
this book in which he advocated a theory of human perfectibility
to be arrived at by means of a gradual equalization of all wealth.
The Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), and other utopian writers
of the era of the French Revolution, had unmistakably influenced
him— men who were chiefly enthusiastic for the overthrow of all
existing institutions which they claimed shackled the human spirit
and distorted reason. All control of man by man was considered

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165

intolerable; they preached about the Day when each human being,
free from restraint, would live by the principles of pure reason
alone, which would be sufficient to guide him in all that was good
for himself and the community.

Godwin was the type of radical who wants to tear things up by
their roots. Only he did not advocate violence. Calm discussion,
he believed, was the only measure necessary to awaken people and
bring about change. The power of Truth would in itself be suf-
ficient to permeate society so that every form of force, including
government, would be unnecessary. “There will be no war, no
crime, no administration of justice, as it is called, and no govern-
ment,” wrote Godwin. “Besides this, there will be neither disease,
anguish, melancholy nor resentment. Every man will seek with in-
effable ardor the good of all.”

Through his book, Godwin not only created a vast audience that
listened to him as though he were the prophet of a new dawn, but
he also became a strong personal influence in the lives of not a few
impressionable young men, particularly Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sam-
uel T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
afterwards Lord Lytton. Godwin was indubitably influential. “He
blazed up as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more
talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever lib-
erty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off.” So
wrote William Hazlitt. Shelley, who repudiated all outward au-
thority and the despotism of custom, was swept off his feet. Godwin
became to him the most honored of all oracles, until he eloped with
the prophet’s seventeen-year-old daughter Mary, notwithstanding
the fact that about eight weeks previously Shelley had remarried
Harriet Westbrook.

The book and its author who had so ably formulated the philos-
ophy of anarchism, and had so powerfully influenced and inspired
other young men, left young Malthus singularly unenthralled. In
several conversations with his father touching on Godwin’s ideas
(particularly those stated in the essay on Avarice and Profusion in
a volume entitled The Enquirer), Malthus marshaled several argu-
ments against Godwin’s entire system of thought which he regarded
as naive and based upon a distortion of history and economics. To
Godwin’s thesis that a utopia could be achieved by the mere re-

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

moval of all restraints Malthus replied that these restraints were
necessary to save society from its worst horror: the unlimited in-
crease in population. The removal of all restraint would permit
men to spawn beyond' the ability of the earth to feed and support
their offspring. This condition would give rise to vast miseries
which would not only prevent the realization of any such happy
utopia as Godwin had in mind, but also might easily end in the
complete disintegration of society as we know it.

Daniel Malthus was so impressed with the weight and originality
of his son’s argument that he urged him to publish it. And that is
how the famous Essay on Population was given to the world to
puncture the gorgeous bubble of Godwin’s Political Justice.

The first edition of the Essay is a pamphlet of about 50,000 words
divided into nineteen short chapters. To those who habitually swal-
low everything and chew nothing, the Essay came as a distinct shock.
Godwin’s book had been written knee-deep in lush optimism. But
here was a pamphlet in stinging refutation that fairly dripped with
pessimism. “The view which he [the author] has given of human
life has a melancholy hue,” acknowledges the anonymous Malthus
in his own introductory remarks, “but he feels conscious that he
has drawn these dark tints from a conviction that they are really in
the picture; and not from a jaundiced eye, or an inherent spleen
of disposition.” Those who first read the Essay found that all their
standards and landmarks were suddenly blown about. When the
air is full of unknown quantities men are uncomfortable and— very
often— angry. Godwin, in particular, brooded in bitterness.

The fields of sociology and economics are cluttered up with so
many theories, singularly sterile and paraded with a pretense at
wisdom, that one must be on guard against absurdities. “A writer
may tell me,” says Malthus cautiously in the first chapter of the
Essay, “that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I can-
not properly contradict him. But before he can expect to bring any
reasonable person over to his opinion, he ought to show, that the
necks of mankind have been gradually elongating; that the lips have
grown harder, and more prominent; that the legs and feet are daily
^tering their shape; and that the hair is beginning to change into

MALTHUS

167

stubs of feathers.” In these words we discover the beginnings of the
modern effort to bring scientific method into a field where nothing
but vague general ideas had prevailed. It is the temper of his in-
quiry that makes Malthus so important. His outlook was truly sci-
entific; he did not wish to consider man as an object for praise or
blame. That kind of approach, he felt, had long hampered a fair
and unshackled appraisal of the facts. If reputed facts come heavily
encrusted with emotional charges of one kind or another, then con-
clusions drawn from them are not science but a masquerade of sci-
ence. Malthus’ great merit lies in considering man objectively, as a
part of nature, a creature possessed of a certain characteristic be-
havior from which certain consequences must follow as day follows
night. No amount of disagreement as to the validity of his theory
can impair the value of his method.

“I think I may fairly make two postulata,” he announces to the
reader as he calmly begins the really significant part of the Essay.
“First, that food is necessary to the existence of man, secondly, that
the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly
in its present state.”

In bringing together the necessities of food and sex, Malthus
upset Godwin’s most important assumptions. The powerful and in-
timate linkage between these two factors, so real to Malthus and
apparently so elusive to others, proved to be blindingly simple.
One likes to think of that character in Moliere’s play Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme who expresses unbounded delight on being told that
he has been talking prose all his life. Without perhaps even realiz-
ing it people began to find out that food and sex were inescapably
what Malthus said they were: namely, the two basic “postulata” of
existence. He ridiculed Godwin’s idea that the passion between the
sexes may in time be extinguished. “These two laws ever since we
have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed
laws of our nature; and, as we have not hitherto seen any altera-
tion in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease
to be what they now are.’’

Having thus established the pivotal ‘ basis of , his argument,
Malthus then proceeds to show the signifiamce of these two forces:

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

“Assuming then, my postulata as granted, I say that the power
of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth
to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, in-
creases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arith-
metical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the
immensity of the first power in comparison with the second. By
that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of
man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.
This implies a strong and constantly operating check on popula-
tion from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall
somewhere; and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion
of mankind. Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature
has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and
liberal hand. She has been comparatively sparing in the room, and
the nourishment necessary to rear them. The germs of existence
contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room
to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few
thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all-pervading law of na-
ture, restrains them within prescribed bounds. The race of plants
and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law. And
the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it. . . .
This natural inequality of the two powers of population, and of
production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which
must constantly keep their effects equal, is the great difficulty that
to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of
society. All other arguments are of slight and subordinate consid-
eration in comparison with this. I see no way by which man can
escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animated
nature. No fancied equality, no agrarian regulations in their ut-
most extent, could remove the pressure of it even for a single cen-
tury. And it appears, therefore, to be decisive against the possible ex-
istence of a society, all the members of which should live in ease,
happiness, and comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about pro-
viding the means of subsistence for themselves and families. Con-
sequently, if the premises are just, the argument is conclusive against
the perfectibility of the mass of manki n d.”

The rest of the: JEssay is a detailed examination of the truth of
tha paragraph.

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169

Six editions of the Essay were published during Malthus’ life-
time. Five years passed before the second edition appeared in 1803.
In the meantime a hot stream of vituperation poured down upon
him. The modest country parson was accused of defending wars,
famine, plagues because he had claimed that these agencies have
always stepped in to reduce overpopulation. More than a score of
formal replies were shot at him in refutation. Where there was no
understanding of his ideas, his opponents resorted to execration
and abuse. He was condemned for having denounced soup kitchens,
early marriage and parish allowances. And above all things, for
having the impudence to marry, after preaching the evils of families.

The objections that were made to his doctrine when it first
claimed public attention— that it was gloomy, depressing, and hor-
rible-implied an unscientific attitude of mind, Malthus wdshed to
study man as a natural phenomenon, utterly divorced from emo-
tional considerations. In order to do that he was prepared to have
himself called the prophet of pessimism.

In the warfare of debate that has raged over his theory for almost
a century and a half, Malthus has never been without enthusiastic,
supporters. Prime Minister William Pitt, who in 1796 thought that
any man had “enriched his country” by producing large numbers
of children, even if the whole family were paupers, abandoned this
idea on reading the Essay. Thus did Malthus’ theory, early in its
career, affect legislation; for Pitt dropped his Poor Bill of 1800 and
stated in the House of Commons that he did so in deference to the
views of “those whose opinions he was bound to respect.”

Pitt’s conversion was not more important than that of Archdeacon
William Paley, England’s most popular theologian. Paley, who had
once argued that “the decay of population is the greatest evil a
State can suffer, and the improvement of it the object which ought
in all countries to be aimed at, in preference to every other po-
litical purpose whatsoever,” was now prepared to say that he had
been in error. The Essay had awakened him to the danger of a
tumorous overgrowth of population.

At a time when people everywhere believed that a nation’s
strength and its economic prosperity depended entirely on the num-

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

her of its inhabitants, when statesmen, poets, philosophers and econ-
omists held that public rvelfare, national wealth, and census figures
were axiomatically interdependent, Mai thus arose and exposed the

error of such teaching.

As we have seen, every great theory brings to an end some curi-
ous belief. With his inquiry Malthus killed the doctrine that under
all circumstances an increasing population is desirable. It took cour-
age to take this stand; Malthus anticipated only too well that his
ideas would not be the sort people wanted to hear, any more than
they liked reading Voltaire’s Candide. But the frontal attack upon
umvarranted optimism made it no longer possible for mankind to
be lulled into the apathy of believing that all is for the best in this
“best of all possible worlds.”

Malthus now became the most talked of man in England. An
avalanche of replies and refutations, some of them from Godwin,
were indicative of widespread hostility; for he xvas accused of favor-
ing vice and misery, hardheartedness and oppression. Karl Marx
and Henry George denounced him bitterly. Nonetheless, his views
were swiftly being adopted by an increasingly large and influential
circle-economists, editors, educators. Malthus soon came to occupy
a unique position as the most rejected and the most accepted man
of his age.

It has been claimed that Malthus was dogmatic. The tone of the
Essay is both reasonable and elevated. Perhaps its cool scientific ob-
jectivity was too great a chill to the ardor of those who believed so
zealously in the perfectibility of mankind. Godwin claimed that
Malthus had forsaken the protection and assistance of the poor,
that his theory was “un-Christian,” tainted with a strong upper-class
bias. A man who projects a theory is necessarily a man of strong
convictions. Indeed, the most interesting part of his mind is the
sum total of his convictions. Such a man is not reactionary or dog-
matic because he says, “I believe.” Certainly Malthus was not. He
had none of Godwin’s conceit, nor that tone of finality which
Thomas Love Peacock so well expressed in the following doggerel:

“Not a scheme in agitation
For the world’s amelioration
/ Has a grain of common s^ense in it

MALTHUS

A year after the appearance of the first edition of the Essay,
Maithus spent several months in travel on the continent in search
of statistical material to buttress the basic elements of his theory.
He visited Sweden, Norway, Finland, and a part of Russia, “these
being the only countries at the time open to English travelers.”
Three years later he spent some time in France and Switzerland
gathering additional data for his second edition. More than ever
was he convinced that he had found the clue to human misery.

When the second edition finally appeared, the Essay had been
expanded into a lengthy treatise. “In the course of this inquiry, I
found that much more had been done than I had been aware of
when I first published the essay. The poverty and misery arising
from a too rapid increase of population had been distinctly seen,
and the most violent remedies proposed, so long ago as the times of
Plato and Aristotle.”

Within a few months after the appearance of the second edition,
Maithus married his cousin Harriet Eckersall of Bath, England. He
was now thirty-eight years old, a tall man of a ruddy complexion,
with red whiskers, bright darkish-blue eyes, auburn hair, and a dis-
tinguished figure. His portrait by John Linnell hangs at Dalton
Hall, Albury, together with a companion portrait of Mrs. Maithus.
The picture shows a handsome, kindly philosopher, quite in con-
trast to the gloomy and vicious monster created by his intemperate
opponents of pamphleteering controversy. He had a keen sense of
humor, a gift his calumniators lacked; and those who knew him
attest by general acknowledgment that he was a good father, a de-
voted husband, a pleasant companion, and always a charming host.

In the same year that he married Miss Eckersall, Maithus was
appointed to the professorship of modem history and political econ-
omy at the newly founded East India College, located at Haileybury
in Hertfordshire, about twelve miles from London. This unique
institution was established by the East India Company to train its
young men for Oriental civil service, as a gateway to a lucrative
career. Until his death in 1834, Maithus occupied this post which
was the first of its kind to be established in England. Here for thirty
years his students and his three children called him “Pop,” and

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

172

his life was placid and cheerful. He was blessed also with an agree
able and understanding wife. “The tradition of Mrs. Malthus de^
liofhtful evening parties, at which the elite of the London scientific
wwld were often present, lingered at Haileybury as long as the

College lasted.” ^

° 8

It is not the novelty of the facts but the powerful and smashing
emphasis he placed on them that makes Malthus theory mem-
orable. To have hammered the truth of population into the con-
sciousness of mankind was the great accomplishment of that simple
generalization which he alone made the facts yield. Other men had
written about population problems, but their approach was vagaie
and clumsy. Malthus combined logic and intuition and a wide
knowledge of social-economics with a clarity of presentation. In
describing how the Essay was composed Malthus frankly states: It
w’as written on the spur of the occasion, and from the few ma-
terials which were then within my reach in a country situation.
The only authors from whose writings I had deducted the prin-
ciple, xvhich formed the main argument of the Essay, were Hume,
Wallace, Doctor Adam Smith and Doctor Price.” Whereas his pred-
ecessors produced only lamentably meager results, Malthus, in his
quest for relationship between facts, evolved a theory.

■ ■

Malthus claimed that population, when unchecked, tends to in-
crease in geometric ratio while the food supply increases only arith-
metically. “Taking the population of the world at any number,”
argued Malthus, “a thousand millions, for instance, the human
species would increase in the ratio of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256,
512, etc., and subsistence as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, etc. In two
centuries and a quarter, the population would Be to the means of
subsistence as 512 to 10; in three centuries as 4096 to 13; and in two
thousand years tire difference would be almost incalculable, though
the produce in that time would have increased to an immense ex-
, tent.”

' f Is this true? Is it true that human increase is geometric (by mul-
tiplication) while food is only arithmetic (by addition)?

Despite Malthus’ strong emphasis, it must be admitted that the

MALTHUS

173

mathematical ratio as he originally gave it is not the essential point
of the theory. When Malthus came to write the article on Popula-
tion in the MacVey Napier Supplement to the Encyclopedia Bri-
tannica (1824), leaned away from the mathematical aspect. This
was his final, his best, and his most mature reflection. Dropping the
geometric-arithmetic ratio, the theory still stands, for the law of
population as Malthus enunciated it, shorn of its unnecessary sec-
ondary propositions, is this: Life everywhere and always tends to
exceed the warrant for it. This stresses the differential nature of
food and fecundity without contending for an exact mathematical
statement of their relationship.

Yet calculations on the subject are helpful in illustrating the na-
ture of human fecundity. “Let us,” suggests Professor A. M. Carr-
Saunders in his Population Problem, “consider a population of a
million bom in the same year, half of whom are males and half
females. Let us suppose that they all marry, each couple before the
age of twenty producing two children, half of whom are girls and
half boys. For the sake of simplicity we may imagine that at the
end of each twenty-year period the parents die simultaneously with
the birth of their offspring. Then, if the children marry and pro-
duce offspring as did their parents, we shall have a standard popu-
lation of 1,000,000 which will neither increase nor decrease so long
as these conditions are fulfilled. If, however, the average number
of children is two and one-half per couple, then in 100 years the
population will be 3,000,000; if three, 7,954,000; if four, 32,000,000;
if five, 97,650,000.” These figures of Carr-Saunders’ very simply il-
lustrate how the Malthusian doctrine is based upon the enormous
strength of human increase which is operative at all times, in all
places, and under all conditions. There is no escaping it. Neither
capitalism, fascism, democracy or communism can set it aside. This
alone is the fundamental doctrine of Malthus, inescapable, irre-
pressible, incontestable. Those dreary and fruitless discussions that
have raged over the inconsequentials of his theory are nothing more
than a meaningless jousting with windmills.

Nor did Charles Darwin, the supreme theorist of biology, mis-
take this essential feature. Shortly after he had returned from the
voyage of the Beagle he chanced to read the Essay. Its basic prin-
ciple struck him with such overpowering force that it alone sup-

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

^74

plied him with the key to his own theory of natural selection.
Maithus is the only thinker to whom Darwin was directly indebted.
And this debt he acknowledges in the well-known passage in the
Autobiography: “In October, 1838, that is, fifteen months after I
had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amuse-
ment Maithus on Population, and being well prepared to appre-
ciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from
long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it
at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable varia-
tions would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be de-
stroyed. The result of this would be the formation of a new species.
Here then I had at last got hold of a theory by which to work.”

Independently of Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace saw exactly the
same thing. Wallace, the magnanimous colleague, was resting be-
tween fits of fever at Temate in the Malay Archipelago. Something
brought to his recollection the work of Maithus which he had read
twelve years before. “I thought of his clear exposition of ‘the posi-
tive checks to increase’— disease, accidents, war, and famine— which
keep down the population of savage races to so much lower an
average than that of more civilized peoples. It then occurred to me
that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the
case of animals also; and as animals usually breed much more rap-
idly than does mankind, the destruction every year from these causes
must be enormous in order to keep down the number of each
species.”

Both Darwin and Wallace followed the clue which Maithus gave
them. Both saw that every species gives rise to many more descend-
ants than ever attain to maturity, and that, therefore, the greater
number of all plants and animals perish without reproducing. Those
that survive in the struggle of nature carry on; hence they are se-
lected. This spells natural selection.

Having profoundly influenced two great theorists, Maithus was
yet to influence another who, like Darwin and Wallace, saw clearly
the basic principle of the Essay and was led by it, independently,
from a social problem to a biological generalization. This thinker
was Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) of whom Huxley once said that
his (Spencer’s) idea of a great tragedy was a beautiful theory killed
by an ugly fact. In 1852 Spencer wrote an important essay entitled

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175

A Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal
Fertility. It was Malthus’ influence that suggested to Spencer the
idea that the struggle for existence leads to a survival of the fittest.
Spencer himself coined these historic phrases. That is how the Mal-
thusian theory became the interpretive formula of the doctrine of
evolution.

Having established the thesis that the tendency of human beings
is to increase beyond the available food supply, Malthus next in-
vestigated the “checks” that everywhere restrict population growth.
In the first edition of the Essay the checks are very simply stated;
whatever tends to produce a smaller number of births is a preventive
check; whatever leads to a greater number of deaths is a positive
check. Plagues, famine, war, infanticide are definitely the larger
positive checks. The fear of falling into poverty causes untold thou-
sands of young people to postpone marriage until they can safely
provide— this is a typical preventive check. In other words, the posi-
tive checks are death-producing; the preventive checks are birth-
limiting. “To these two great checks to population, in all long-oc-
cupied countries, which I have called the preventive and the posi-
tive checks, may be added vicious customs with respect to women,
great cities, unwholesome manufactures, luxury, pestilence, and war.
All these checks may be fairly resolved into misery and vice. And
that these are the true causes of the slow increase of population in
all the states of Modem Europe, will appear sufficiently evident
from the comparatively rapid increase that has invariably taken
place, whenever these causes have been in any considerable degree
removed.”

The ultimate check to population is, of course, the food supply.
This Malthus showed to be basic. It arises from the different ra-
tios according to which population and food increase. The severe
pressure of human mouths on the means of subsistence gives rise
to all sorts of situations which operate ceaselessly and cruelly to
keep down the number to the level of the supply. Without de-
population forces acting very sharply, every country would be sub-
ject to periodical plagues and famine.

With each successive edition the Essay was amplified. By the time
the reader arrives at the sixth edition, he finds that the discussion

iy6 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

o£ the checks to population has swollen into a torrent of two hun-
dred and fifty-three pages. With incredible assiduity Malthus had
examined the statistics of European countries and their colonies,
in an endeavor to throw the maximum illumination upon the dark
complexities of this problem. For this reason he kept on pouring
an enormous amount of research, both historical and statistical, into
his various editions. He considered the populations of India, China,
Arabia, Japan, as well as those of Europe, in both the medieval and
modern ages. In Africa, he saw the checks to population to be
chiefly of the positive kind: incessant warfare, epidemics, famine
and a high percentage of accidents. The struggle for food among
the Negro tribes was so great that longevity was rare. After discuss-
ing the checks to population in Northern and Southern Siberia he
passes on to consider the peoples of Persia and the Turkish domin-
ions, then to Hindustan and Tibet. America, Europe, Asia, Africa,
Australia— all come under his observation. The subject intoxicated
him for a lifetime.

To supplement the checks to population arising out of misery
and vice Malthus, in later editions, recommended “moral restraint.”
By moral restraint he meant postponement of marriage, and this,
he said, if it did not lead directly to vice, was “undoubtedly the
least evil that can arise from the principle of population.” Malthus
did not advocate birth control by contraceptives. By moral restraint
he meant “a restraint from marriage, from prudential motives, with
a conduct strictly moral during the period of restraint.” He was
opposed to the limitation of offspring once marriage has been con-
tracted. Particularly did he denounce all methods applied by human
effort for the mitigation of the evil of overpopulation. “Promiscuous
intercourse, unnatural passions, violations of the marriage bed, and
improper arts to conceal the consequences of irregular connections,
are preventive checks that clearly come under the head of vice.”
Malthus advocated late marriage and strict continence until mar-
riage as the best solution. He advocated nothing more than that.

Others, however, more daring than he (w'ho likewise saw and
assented to the basic principle of his Essay), advocated early mar-
riage and instruction in the use of contraceptives. They called them-
selves Neo-Malthusians. Unlike Malthus, they preached the tech-
nique and practice of birth control which the reverend professor

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177

strongly repudiated. The founder and leader of this unorthodox
movement was Francis Place (1771-1854), social reformer and the-
orist, whose significant international contribution, until very re-
cently, remained in unmerited obscurity.

Place rejected the Malthusian remedy of moral restraint— that is,
a long-delayed marriage with strict continence. He rejected the
Malthusian barrier between single and married life which carried
with it the idea that once people were wedded they should be left
to propagate up to the physiological limit of their ability by the
whimsical operation of the “laws” governing the consequences of
their own acts. But the essential Malthusian doctrine that popula-
tion has a capacity for increasing faster than subsistence was, for
Place, a cardinal and indisputable proposition. “My attention was
called to the principle of population,” wrote Place, “soon after Mr.
Malthus published the first edition of his Essay and I have ever
since been a careful observer of and a diligent inquirer into the
habits and circumstances of the working people, and especially in
regard to the consequences of population amongst them.”

Of all people in England at that time, how did it happen that
Francis Place— a journeyman tailor— was able to see so clearly and
courageously what others missed? The story of his life is an in-
credible record of a self-taught workingman.

Brought up practically in the gutters of London, Francis Place
was the son of a drunkard and gambler who was a bailiff and keeper
of a “sponging house” (private debtor’s prison) in Vinegar Yard
near Drury Lane. Left early to shift for himself, the boy was batted
about among the low companions of the streets until, at the age of
fourteen, he secured his first job as an assistant to a wretched and
disreputable tailor. This marks the beginning of his great career,
for the opportunity was now given him to learn the trade of a
leather-breeches maker. In this business, after years of hard strug-
gle, he was eventually to become one of the most successful tailors
of the British metropolis with sufficient means to retire and devote
himself exclusively to the lofty purposes of social reform.

In 1791, at the age of nineteen. Place married an unusual girl,
Elizabeth Chadd. She too was of the very poor working-class, but

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178

she was possessed of a fine mind and a strong character with a- de*
termination to help her husband get on in the world. She proved
the great moral influence of his life “and lifted him, smirched but

not deeply stained, from the mire of his past surroundings.”

The marriage that began so hopefully suffered a severe strain
within two years. A strike forced the young husband out of work
and left him and his wife and child on the verge of starvation for
eight months. Those long cruel weeks of acute suffering brought
young Place into close grips with misery, and the memory of its
horror was never erased from his mind. Save for an insatiable de-
sire to improve himself those months of unemployment would have
demoralized him. But the encouragement of his wife and his own
intense resolution for knowledge led Place to fill all these unhappy
days with study. He read widely and deeply, but more especially
did he concentrate on mathematics, law, history and philosophy.

Following his return to work. Place became secretary and or-
ganizer to several trade clubs; he frequently drew up their articles
or rules, and spent much time attending meetings and delivering
notices. This active participation in the stern struggle of the work-
ing-class stimulated the urge, greater now than ever, to read, to
study, and to learn. He was troubled at this time by religious ques-
tions which were resolved by his mastery of Hume’s Essays and
Paine’s Age of Reason. It was of course the era of the French Revo-
lution, and no young man living in so great a metropolis as Lon-
don and suffering as he had suffered, could avoid being influenced
by the stirring humanitarian messages that flamed out of that so-
cial upheaval. Accordingly, he joined in June, 1794, the famous
London Corresponding Society, whose originator and secretary,
Thomas Hardy, had been arrested on a charge of high treason. The
Society was a mildly proletarian organization, English working-class
supporters of the ideas of the French Revolution. Its intentions
were far from radical. Universal suffrage, annual parliaments, pay-
ment of members were some of the major reforms it advocated.
The chief object of the Society was to enable working-class organi-
zations to communicate with each other. “In this Society,” wrote
Place, “I met with many inquisitive, clever, upright men, and
among them I greatly enlarged my acquaintance. They were in
most, if not in all, respects superior to any with whom I had

MALTHUS

hitherto been acquainted. We had book subscriptions. . . . We had
Sunday evening parties at the residences of those who could ac-
commodate a number of persons. At these meetings we had read-
ings, conversations, and discussions. There were at this time a great
many such parties; they were highly useful and agreeable.”

It was in 1795, while Place was chairman of the Corresponding
Society, that he determined to go into business for himself. He felt
that he had by now sufficient courage, sufficient experience, to alter
his career from a journeyman to a master tradesman. A long period
of suffering and privation gradually yielded to his indomitable
spirit and prodigious industry. It is characteristic of Place that
while he was passing through innumerable vicissitudes on his road
to success, he spent several evenings of each week in study. He had
determined to learn French in a well-thought-out plan to know
Helvetius, Voltaire, Rousseau and other French thinkers at first
hand. This knowledge of French helped form his social and polit-
ical philosophy and proved to be immensely valuable in his busi-
ness.

His first tailor shop at 29 Charing Cross was followed by a larger
and more conspicuous store at Number i6 exactly two years later.
“I put in a new front as elegant as the place would permit. Each
of the panes of glass in the shop front cost me three pounds, and
two in the door four pounds each. . . . Such shop fronts were then
uncommon; I think mine were the largest plate glass windows in
London, if indeed they were not the first.” The alert modern busi-
nessman who understands sometliing about the psychology of a
store front can appreciate how far Place had advanced beyond his
time.

In a room behind his prosperous shop, Place accumulated a li-
brary which became his retreat from the demands of business. In
this sanctum he consulted his books, and into its privacy he ad-
mitted notable men, members of Parliament, and authors, among
whom were William Godwin and Robert Owen, the father of Brit-
ish socialism.

After acquiring a sufficient competence. Place retired from busi-
ness. He turned over the shop and its affairs to his oldest son. Now
in his forty-sixth year, in the prime of his mental powers, relieved
from economic pressure. Place boldly faced the new possibilities of

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

180

his life. His labors, both theoretical and practical, which he him-
self initiated, alone and unaided in the face of relentless opposi-
tion, have commended themselves to posterity. The reward of his
patient observation and persistent inquiry is that he has become
one of the great benefactors of the human race.

The reforms that Place championed, until he died at the age of
eighty-two, are legion: the education of workers, trade unionism,
freedom of the press, penny postage, abolition of the Corn Laws
and other notable endeavors. He drafted the People’s Charter of
1838, prepared for publication Robert Owen’s Essays on the Foun-
dation of Character and Bentham’s Not Paul, but Jesus; assisted
Roebuck in editing the Pamphlets for the People, and directed the
publication in cheap form of James Mills’ Essays. Most important
of all, he wrote that remarkable book to advocate birth control. It
appeared in 1822 under the title Illustrations and Proofs of the
Principle of Population; including an examination of the proposed
remedies of Mr. Malthus and a reply to the objections of Mr. God-
win and others.

Place was deeply versed in the economic, political and social views
of his day, and his book shows it. As it was an age which saw great
recasting of men’s beliefs and practices, the erstwhile tailor of
Charing Cross was singularly prepared to render the molding proc-
ess distinguished service. What seemed to him basic to all social
reform was some effort at birth control. Population in England,
he believed, was already too large for the welfare of the country, a
heavy burden on the working-classes. Something had to be done
about it. Here then was a particular work awaiting an intelligent
crusader. And here was the man who did not shrink from it.

Malthus had expressed the hope that late marriages would be the
solution to the problem. By practicing “moral restraint’’ people
would wed in their late thirties rather than in their early twenties.
Francis Place saw the problem far more realistically. He was con-
vinced that the delay of marriage, even if it were possible, would
be harmful and that the biologic urge was too strong and essential
to life to be held in check by any such dream as “moral restraint.”
Certainly it was idle to expect that the working-classes would ac-

MALTHUS

l8l

cept it or, even if they did, act upon it. Malthus’ remedy was im-
practicable and would never be adopted. “His [Place’s] own early
marriage,” observes one of his biographers, “had been his salva-
tion. He had failed to live decently in celibacy even to the age of
nineteen; and, for the man of the laboring-class who awaited as-
sured means of supporting a family before taking a wife, the hor-
ror of this youthful experience foretold to him hopeless immorality.
But experience no less emphatically warned him that early mar-
riage meant many children. He himself, it is recorded, was the
father of fifteen [born between 1792 and 1817], of whom five died
in childhood.”

The epoch-making paragraphs of Place’s book begin at the top
of Page 173. Unequivocally he argues for birth control (contracep-
tion) as the best means of preventing the numbers of mankind from
increasing faster than food is provided. His distinctive contribu-
tion is the high moral advocacy of the employment of contraceptive
measures for reasonable and ethically defensible purposes. Within
six and a half pages (pp. 173-179) he elaborates his theory which
has resulted in one of the most profoundly significant movements
of the modem world.

What did Place think of Godwin? For the most part he con-
sidered Godwin’s ideas occult, based upon rhetoric and optimism
instead of reasoned evidence. To expect human fecundity to “wear
out,” subsistence to be made to increase faster than population,
man to become immortal *— all this was too much for Place to ac-
cept. A large part of Illustrations and Proofs is therefore given over
to a thoroughgoing refutation of Godwin. When the reader finishes
reading Place’s complete demolition of Godwin’s views he feels that
the author of Political Justice, like Icarus, has fallen to his death
because, though his wings were willing, the wax was weak.

The immediate influence of Place’s book was not great; its ap-
pearance attracted little attention. But the pronouncement of the
theory, so clear in Place’s mind, galvanized him into fearless activ-
ity. Having written his theory into a book, it ceased to be for him
a mere intellectual speculation. In his hands it became at once a
powerful tool for social reform. Accordingly, Place set for himself

• That is, to argue that human life would eventually be prolonged indefi-
nitely.:

iSs ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

the task of public enlightenment. He organized a campaig-n to
spread the doctrine of birth control and the use of contraceptives:
“The author is perfectly aware that he has exhibited views and
proposed remedies which will with some persons expose him to
censure; but he is also aware of the utility of thus exposing him-
self.”

A year after the appearance of Illustrations and Proofs, Place
drafted and printed three dignified handbills addressed respec-
tively: (r) To the Married of Both Sexes, (2) To the Married of
Both Sexes of the Working People, (3) To the Married of Both
Sexes in Genteel Life. They were anonymous documents and were
circulated widely through various channels. Place, who knew more
about the morals of the English working-classes than perhaps any other
person in the kingdom, took a realistic view of the situation. Birth
control could not possibly make matters worse, because little chastity
existed anywhere, promiscuity, both premarital and postmarital,
being very general. Malthus’ advocacy of deferred marriage intro-
duced a new heartlessness into society and invited a coarser im-
morality than previously existed. It was perilous advice. Place argued
that marriage, in order not to be an extravagant indiscretion for
youth, had to be established upon the safe and sane practice of
contraception.

In these handbills the retired tailor crystallized the mute long-
ings of man’s desire to limit human offspring by methods at once
harmless and humanitarian. Undaunted by abuse, he continued to
advance the cause of birth control until his death in 1854. Every
workingman whose confidence he could gain, every newspaper or
magazine that would print his letters or articles, every committee
that would listen to him, heard the practical message of this theory
expounded. Out of his own pocket he defrayed all costs. When
he died it was written that he was “valuable in council, fertile in
resource, performing great labors, but he never thought of him -

The spark of living fire which Place set aglow gave light to other
penetrating minds. The story of the birth control movement is a
history of the triumph of m idea and a record of martyrdoms
within the memory of living men and women. Not only was it nec-

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183

essary to anounce the doctrine to an apathetic world, but its
proponents had to battle the prejudices of orthodox religion, medi-
cine, and government. Richard Carlile (1790-1843), the advocate of
free speech who at various times in his life spent over nine years
in different jails, was among the first to espouse the cause of Place’s
theory. Carlile published a daring tract entitled Every Woman’s
Book which proved enormously popular. In addition to being an
author, Carlile was a lecturer and his speaking tours up and down
the country spread the new gospel throughout England.

The first tract on birth control to be published in America was
the work of Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877), son of Robert Owen,
an old friend of Francis Place. The younger Owen did not like
the “style and tone” of Carlile’s book, and thereupon he wrote
Moral Physiology, or, a Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population
Question, which appeared in New York City in December, 1830.
It was an eloquent document, justly meriting the wide circulation
it enjoyed— approximately 75,000 copies— until Owen’s death.

Moral Physiology was followed in 1832 by a pamphlet called
Fruits of Philosophy, or, the private companion of young married
people, by Charles Knowlton (1800-1850), a western Massachusetts
physician. Knowlton had been deeply influenced by Place’s hand-
bills and felt that the medical profession ought not to be silent in so
momentous and far-reaching a concern. Shortly after its appear-
ance Doctor Knowlton was fined at Taunton, Massachusetts, and
was sentenced at Cambridge to three months’ hard labor.

More sensational than anything that had yet happened in the
birth control movement was the prosecution of Charles Bradlaugh
and Annie Besant in England for republishing Knowlton’s pamph-
let in 1876. Bradlaugh (1833-1891), who had long been the out-
standing champion of freedom of opinion and liberty of the press,
undertook the printing of the Knowlton pamphlet in order to
vindicate the right of free discussion. “We republish this pamphlet,”
declared Bradlaugh in his introduction to Knowlton’s Fruits of
Philosophy, “honestly believing that on all questions affecting the
happiness of the people, whether they be theological, political, or
social, fullest right of free discussion ought to be maintained at all
hazards. . . . We believe, with the Reverend Mr. Malthus,>that
population has a tendency to increase faster than the means of

184 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

existence, and that some checks must therefore exercise control
over population. Xhe checks now exercised are semi-staivation and
preventable disease; the enormous mortality among the infants of
the poor is one of the checks which now keeps down the population.
The checks that ought to control population are scientific, and it
is these which we advocate. We think it more moral to prevent
the conception of children than, after they are born, to murder
them by want of food, air, and clothing. We advocate scientific
checks to population, because, so long as poor men have large
families, pauperism is a necessity, and from pauperism grow crime
and disease. ... We point the way of relief and happiness; for the
sake of these we publish what others fear to issue; and we do it,
confident that if we fail the first time, we shall succeed at last.”

Both Mr. Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant were arrested and brought
to trial. In his speech in his own defense, Bradlaugh was fully aware
that he was running the gauntlet of fierce and unbending hostility;
“.I ask you, then, to consider the issues which I have put to you
already and which I put to you again-viz.. Is overpopulation the
cause of poverty? Is overpopulation the cause of misery? Is over-
population the cause of crime? Is overpopulation the cause of dis-
ease? Is it moral or immoral to check poverty, ignorance, vice,
crime, and disease? I can only think you will give one answer, that
it is moral to check these evils. You may say: Try to restrain them,
like Malthus, by late marriage. Aye, but even to get late marriage
you must teach poor men and women to comprehend the need for
it, and, even then, if you get real celibacy, Acton and others will
tell you what horrible diseases are the outcome of this state of
things. Really, you never can get even celibacy. You know what
takes place in London and Paris. I have passed through Naples
and Rome, and I have been shocked at being stopped by lads at
night. In Florence, in Berlin, in Paris, you all know what arises
from this pretense of celibacy. Even in our own large centers of
population, such as Dublin, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, you know
what this false pretense of celibacy means. Take the case of Bir-
mingham as an illustration. Walk through the streets of that city
between nine and eleven in the evening, and as the gaslight shows
the flaunting shame, tell me whether celibacy is a reality or a sham.
Tell me whether or not that terrible word ‘prostitution,’ written

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185

everywhere in letters of festering curse, !s not a disfiguring scar
upon the surface of society. It is said that this pamphlet tries to
defend immorality. You must contradict every page of it— ignore
every word of it— to warrant that assumption.”

The jury sentenced the defendants to six months’ imprisonment
and a fine of two hundred pounds. But on Bradlaugh’s appeal to a
higher court the indictment was quashed. Bradlaugh won the battle.
Hundreds of thousands of copies of Knowlton’s pamphlet were now
sold, together with other birth control literature, including Mrs.
Besant’s Law of Population. What had for so long a time been a
feeble movement suddenly became the vigorous world-wide pos-
session of Anglo-Saxon civilization.

Present day accomplishments strike their roots deep in the sub-
soil of earlier efforts. What began in the mind of an unknoxvn
tailor, struggling in the back room of a store at Charing Cross,
grew and finally emerged through this trial from darkness into the
sunlight of a modern triumph. His theory, in our age, has become
the scientific, moral, and humanitarian answer to the vast irrepres-
sible spawning of mankind.

The work of Malthus and Place dealt essentially with the prob-
lem of numbers. Both agreed that, however perfect the social system
might be, unrestricted population must reduce the majority of
humanity to the frightfulness of misery and poverty. Their atten-
tion, therefore, was most naturally focused upon the quantity aspect
of population, a subject that had been discussed in piecemeal fashion
as far back as the days of Plato and Aristotle. But what of quality?
Does not the population problem involve both considerations?

Owing to the work of Darwin and Wallace, both of whom ac-
knowledged their debt to Malthus, the problems of man soon began
to be viewed from a biological angle. It fell to Francis Galton
(1822-1911), a cousin of Charles Darwin, to see clearly the full
significance of the qualitative side of population and to undertake
a scientific investigation of the factors that would lead to its im-
provement. “I always think of you,” wrote Galton in a letter to
Darwin dated December 24, 1869, “in the same way as converts
from barbarism think of the teacher who first relieved them from

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

the intolerable burden of their superstition. . . . Consequently the
appearance of your Origin of Species formed a real crisis in my life;
your book drove away the constraint of my old superstition as if
it had been a nightmare, and was the first to give me freedom of
thought.” Galton saw that, just as animals breed, man breeds;
and the laws of selection that lead to an improvement of, say, a
flock of sheep or a herd of cattle are basically the same laws that
must be called upon to produce a better quality of human beings.
Man can elevate man.

The Darwinian impulse flowered in Gabon’s mind, after long
years of exceptional and original work, into the science of eugenics
which is built upon the theory that human reproduction can be
controlled in order to benefit the race. Galton himself coined the
term eugenics from a Greek word meaning wellborn. He employed
it for the first time in 1883 in his book Inquiries into the Human
Faculty. In this book he showed on biological grounds (heredity)
that Godwin’s no-restraint thesis was untenable. All views of the
social visionaries that stressed with incorrigible optimism mankind’s
improvement by environmental changes, Galton called theories of
“nurture.” While nurture is important, and Galton did not in the
least underestimate it, he saw that Nature was infinitely greater.
Environment is only a part of the story of man. By far the more
important part is heredity. It is not enough to improve the outside
of man; efforts must be made to improve what is going on inside
of him. The population problem, rightly considered, therefore
embraces two necessary procedures which must develop together-
environment and heredity. The theory that Galton worked out and
the program of eugenics which he projected rest upon the facts of
heredity. “Eugenics,” declared Galton, “is the science which deals
with all influences that improve tire inborn qualities of a race; also
with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.”

All theories have their share of cranks and extremists. Galton
foresaw that eugenics would have its quota; for this reason he
warned against haste and lack of restraint. He knew that he was a
pioneer in a campaign that would have to be laid out over long
decades. To discover the best human strains and perpetuate them
is the task which makes eugenics “the science of rearing human
thoroughbreds.” Stern compulsion, he declared, ought to be exer-

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187

cised to prevent the free and easy propagation of those who are
seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality
and pauperism.

Since the turn of the century, the science which Francis Galton
initiated and christened has brought to the conscience of mankind
the need to civilize the reproductive instinct so that, in the interest
of better human beings, there should be birth release as well as
birth control. Not indiscriminately more children, but certainly
more children from the best stocks and fewer from the worst.

Long before the death of Galton in 1911, it was felt by many
people that the tremendous growth of modern industry, with its
world transportation, immigration, and general technological ad-
vances, had invalidated the Malthusian doctrine, and that conse-
quently the theory of overpopulation was nothing more than a
scare. It is true that Malthus did not live to see the new era ushered
in, bringing a season of prosperity and plenty which seemed to
belie his gloomy forebodings. However, within a hundred years
after his death the population of the world has actually doubled.
How did this immense increase come about? The answer is not
far to seek. The industrial changes that transformed the age of
Malthus into our own (the Industrial Revolution) gave a tremen-
dous impetus to population growth, simply because machinery
applied to agriculture resulted in greater cultivation of old lands
and in the development of new and distant virgin soils. World
population, consequently, spurted ahead at an enormous rate until
mankind in our day again confronts the Malthus doctrine wi&
a situation unique in history: there are practically no more virgin
soils to conquer.

What is to be done? Modern theorists take divergent points of
view. The optimum size of a population is a highly controversial
topic wfflich demands many more years of investigation and research
before anything like a truly scientihc opinion may be ventured.
Population studies, in other words, are just in their infancy. Yet the
unmistakable tendency in all advanced democratic countries is
to pursue a policy of restriction of growth based upon the Mai-

i88 architegts of ideas

thusian belief that life will be more desirable if numbers are lim-
ited in accordance with, the available means of support.

Malthus pointed out a very interesting difference between human
increase and food increase; human fecundity is enormous because
it involves a pleasurable experience whereas the acquisition of food
is based on irksome labor. Contraception alone enables man to
adjust this important difference.

Apparently no population policy can be comprehensive that does
not take into account Malthus’ warning, Place’s suggestion, and Gal-
ton’s insistence. It seems therefore that the scientific approach to
mankind must be woven of these three considerations, remember-
ing, of course, that the economic structure which underpins any
given society determines the optimum— that is, how many human
beings can live in comfort upon the available means of supply.

8. Schwann . . theory of the cell

THE majesty of modern science owes much to the telescope and
the microscope, two instruments whose histories are closely inter-
connected. It is certain that without the microscope the theory of
the cell could never have been formulated.

Moreover with each succeeding improvement of the lens the
focus of human curiosity sharpened into impressive new knowledge.

The use of a lens for magnifying purposes goes back to antiquity.
For this reason no historian can say who first conceived the idea
of an instrument for magnification. Simple “magnifiers” such as
burning glasses, spectacles, and other lenses were in constant use
during medieval days. Somewhere between 1590 and 1609 a Dutch
optician, Zacharias Janssen, placed a concave and convex lens at
the ends of a tube and produced a crude microscope, prophetic
of an unseen world. The same principle of compound lenses was
used by another Dutch scientist, Johannes Lippershey, to magnify
objects at a distance. The idea of combining lenses so as to add
new dimensions to the human eye reached Galileo in Italy, as we
have seen. His success with the telescope established the Copemican
theory. Then came the invention, about 1639, of the micrometer
which enabled an observer to adjust a telescope with excellent pre-
cision. Soon other developments followed until the telescope
brought the heavens of the mythical gods down to earth.

Unfortunately, the microscope failed to match these spectacular
strides, although the early advances in the history of both instru-
ments are interrelated. For a long time the microscope was held
back by a serious difficulty known as the chromatic aberration of
the lenses which Isaac Newton declared insoluble. The story of the
cell theory follows the growth of the mechanical perfection of the

igo ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

microscope. All those early speculations and discoveries, which be-
long to the pre-Schwann period, were made possible by such crude
developments of the microscope as were then available. The second
period, however, followed immediately upon the solution of the
problem that Newton had seriously believed would forever block
the hopes of tire pioneers. The way out was discovered by a Swedish
scientist, Samuel Klingenstierna (1698-1765), professor of physics
at Upsala, who succeeded in showing how achromatic glass should
be made. Opticians in Holland, Paris and London began at once
to follow Klingenstierna. The microscope which had long been an
imperfect instrument suddenly gave new impetus to research. Be-
sides Klingenstierna, there was Dolland in England, Chevalier in
France, Amici in Italy who made the new world of improved micro-
scopical visibility the heritage of man.

Limited as they were by the imperfections of the microscope,
the scientists who were first privileged to look through it produced
results that have become a part of the permanent fabric of knowl-
edge. However faulty, their pioneer observations are of tremendous
historical interest. Revealing the hitherto unseen world of minute
organisms and cells is the pre-eminent achievement of Hooke, Grew,
Malpighi, and Leeuwenhoek. Their inquisitive eyes saw nature
more scientifically than any of their predecessors, and their raptur-
ous endeavors led to the formulation of one of the most profound
generalizations of knowledge— the universal cellular organization of
living matter.

The history of a theory is the theory itself. For this reason the
wonder world of the cell begins with the adventure of that ingenious
and accomplished Englishman, Robert Hooke (1635-1703), who
was the first man to discover the cellular structure of living things.
A man of prodigious industry, Hooke among other things was in-
terested in lenses. He was eager to show how much more the
human eye could see when aided by glasses. With delight he turned
them upon everything within his reach. He looked at raindrops,
insects, snowflakes, feathers, scales of a moth’s wings— and one day
upon finely cut sections of cork. To his amazement he found cork
to be composed of tiny-boxHke compartments which he likened to

SCHWANN

19,1

a honeyeomb. He called these compartments ^'cells’" after the Latin
xvord cella^ which means a small i*oom. In 1665 he published , his
Micro graphia—the first book ' devoted ' exclusively to microscopical
.observations. : Aside, from its unique assemblage of , facts, ' the
Micrographia is illustrated by drawings memorable for their beauty
and accuracy. Perhaps they are, as experts now? believe, the work
of Sir Christopher Wren. But their unmistakable inspiration is the
encyclopaedic Robert Hooke.

The incidental observations on the cellular ■ striictiire of , .cork
and other vegetable products which Hooke gave to the world in
his heterogeneous collection stimulated a fellow Englishman, Nehe-
miah Grew ■(i64i“iyi2), to carry on an extensive search into the
microscopic structure of plants. Grew’s first publication on the
subject, The Anatomy of Vegetables Begun^ appeared in 1671. Ten
years later came his revised observations in four books with two
hundred and tw’^elve folio pages, eighty-two plates and five hundred
and thirty-eight figures! A massive study executed by a man of large
and rugged competency."^

The desultory character of Hooke’s observations and the lack
of connection between the topics he discussed prevented the
Micrographia from attaining high scientific value. But with Nehe-
miah Grew it was different. As a scientist Grew concentrated with
almost religious zeal upon vegetable anatomy. Organ by organ he
describes his plants with a fascinating wealth of detail, suggesting
the sexual character of flow^ers: that the pistil corresponds to the
female, and the stamen with its pollen to the male. While Grew
was more concerned wdth the vessels and fibers of plants than with
the cells, he was well aware that the tissues of plants are sponge-
like in character, or, as we should now say “cellular.” He frequently
spoke of the cells of plants as “bladders” and seemed to recognize
that they play an important part in nutrition. But he did not
understand their origin, their composition, the nature of their
growth or their complex function.

Closely paralleling the work of Grew was the microscopical re-
search of a contemporary Italian, that lovable doctor, Marcello
Malpighi (1628-1694), professor at the University of Bologna and

^ While in the waters of Epsom, Grew discovered magnesium sulphate—Epsoni
Salts.

ARCHITECTS OE IDEAS

192

private physician to Pope Innocent XII. Xhe high ideals of this
saintly scientist and his devotion to the pursuit of truth lift his
memory out of the melancholy dust of three centuries. Many of
his discoveries bear directly upon anatomy and physiology. He was,
for example, the first scientist to demonstrate the structure of the
lungs and to indicate the nature of the papillae on the tongue.
Medical men to this day still connect his name with the Malpighian
corpuscles of the spleen and the Malpighian pyTamid of the kidney.
As a pioneer worker with the microscope, and more especially as
a trail-blazer in the world of scientific theory, the acute Malpighi
engages our attention; for he possessed greater genius, a higher
fertility of ideas, and a much more penetrative insight than Nehe-
miah Grew, Like Grew, he too discerned the sexuality of plants
and was one of the first to give an account of the development of
the seed and embryo. Aside from Malpighi’s studies on animal tis-
sues, science is indebted to him for extensive work on anatomy
of plants which he submitted to the Royal Society of London.

The writings of Grew appeared almost simultaneously with the
work of Malpighi. Curiously enough, on the very day (December
7, 1671) that the Royal Society received in print Grew’s first essay,
the Secretary reported having received from Italy Malpighi’s manu-
script dealing with the same subject. The case of Grew and Malpighi
bears a remarkable similarity to that of Charles Darwin and Alfred
Russel Wallace, whose work on evolution arrived by mail from
Ternate in the Malay Archipelago just as Darwin was almost to
announce his discoveries. Grew, in his complete work, refers to
Malpighi and tells how the manuscript of the Italian doctor was
received by the Royal Society on the same day that his own con-
tribution was published. The English botanist, conscious of the
fraternity of science, voluntarily abandoned in Malpighi’s favor
any claim to priority. Matching this expression of magnanimity,
Malpighi undertook a Latin translation of Grew’s writings.

The sketches illustrating the microscopic observations of Mal-
pighi and Grew were not more important than those of the Dutch
investigator, Antonj Van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), the man who
made the first studies in bacteriology. Leeuwenhoek was famous
for having the largest collection of magnifying glasses in the world,
most of which he had made with his own hands. He is the third

SCHWANN

103

member of that group of intense men, all belonging to the seven-
teenth century— one working in England, the other in Italy, and
the third in Holland— who first described the cellular construction
of plants with the crude microscopes at their disposal. Leeuwenhoek
called the cells “globules,” just as Grew had called them “bladders”
and Malpighi had dubbed them “utricles.”

Aside from the extraordinarily faithful representations of their
drawings, these pioneers did not understand or even remotely guess
that the cell is the uniform architectural element of all plant and
animal life. Consequently, lacking this comprehension, they had
no theor)f. Nevertheless their pre-vision reached ahead to fore-
shadow generalizations that were not established in biology until
a century and a half after their labors. To these infinitely curious
men belongs the distinction of' laying strong foundations in science
by breaking away from the thralldom of mere book learning. Time
has shaken many of their opinions and loosened their speculations,
but they relied upon their own eyes when most thinkers were still
blinded by medieval dogmas.

A century after the labors of Grew, Malpighi, and Leeuwenhoek
the world of biological discussion was ringing with a lively interest
in the theoretical side of the youthful science. The air of intellec-
tual Europe was full of theories; scientists were now eager to
establish relationships between that huge mass of new facts made
available by the advent of the microscope. The high purpose of
theory is to help the human intellect clear its vision, for men too
often look at nature through the very badly ground lenses of their
preconceived opinions, their dogmas or prejudices.

Consider, just for illustration, the fanciful fiber theory of the
pompous but gifted eclectic Swiss doctor, Albrecht von Haller
(lyoS-iyyy), whom his unsympathetic critics called “that abyss of
learning.” It is a fine example of the statement that the path of
science is strewn with the bleached bones of dead theories. Haller’s
doctrine declared that all tissues are reducible to fibers as their
ultimate constituents, the fibers being cemented together by “or-
ganized concrete.”

Half overshadowing Haller’s doctrine was the globular theory

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

espoused by a number of men, including Henri Milne-Edwards
(1800-1885), a Belgian scientist of English ancestry. Fibers, Milne-
Edwards supposed, w'ere made up of globules ranged in lines. All
tissues, whether in the embryo or later, he regarded as based upon
these elementary structures. Unfortunately for the globular theory,
there was so much confusion as to the use of terms and w'ords
(globule, granule, molecule) that no systematic statement could be
made. Very' frequently the word globule was used to indicate what
is now clearly recognized as the cell. Essentially, however, the Milne-
Edwards doctrine considered a cell to be produced by globules,
which, of course, was an erroneous assumption. A cell, we now
know, is never produced by anything other than another cell.
Where a cell arises, there a cell must have previously existed.

In the days of Haller men were also arguing the merits of the
preformation theory, loudly championed by the Geneva scientist
Charles Bonnet (1720-1793), which was foolishly believed superior
to the theory of generation propounded by the youthful Kaspar
Friedrich Wolff.

With the notable exception of Wolff’s doctrine (which won the
admiration of Thomas Huxley in the nineteenth century) these
defunct biological theories possess only an antiquarian interest.
However, they show that the knowledge of the cell made slow but
steady progress, the botanists rather than the zoologists leading the
way. Still, no one had a theory about the cell, nor had its character
been closely determined.

No one but Kaspar Friedrich Wolff.

Recalling the story of Doctor Robert Mayer of Heilbronn, we
remember how John Tyndall in a lecture given in London brought
to the attention of the world the gross injustice done to the man
who conceived the entire sweep of the doctrine of the conservation
of energy. What Tyndall accomplished for Mayer, Huxley achieved
for Wolff. Only Wolff was long dead when Huxley published in
1853 an article entitled The Cell Theory in the British and Foreign
Medico-Chirurgical Review, which lifted the forgotten German sci-
entist out of a frozen Russian grave into the light of world acclaim.

Born in Berlin in 1733, the son of a poor tailor, Wolff became

SCHWANN

195

a doctor first by attending the Medico-Surgical College of his native
city and then by obtaining his degree from the University of Halle.
There in 1759. at the age of twenty-six, he presented his doctor’s
thesis entitled Theoria Generationis (Theory of Generation). A
copy was sent to Haller for review.

All that Haller and his eminent colleagues in medicine, anatomy,
and biology stood for, this book denied. In it young Wolff demol-
ished the doctrine of preformation— the belief that various forms
of animal life existed in miniature in the egg, and that the process
of development merely consisted of the unfoldment of the pre-
formed embryo. An analogy to flower-buds was commonly used by
the upholders of preformation to illustrate their doctrine. Just as
in a small bud all the parts of the flower are already present, so
in the animal egg, including the human, all generation was be-
lieved nothing more than the emergence (unfolding) of already
existing parts. Haller passionately defended this view not only on
scientific grounds, but he also claimed that the teachings of the
Bible and revealed religion demanded that it be so. For the doctrine
of preformation was essentially the dogma of original creation,
according to which all formation of life was completed by God
at the beginning of the world. The individuals of each species of
ani mal and plants— so preformation claimed— had been created
simultaneously for all time: the first female of every species con-
tained within her all the individuals of that species (present and
future) until the end of time. As for human beings, the forms
of all men were contained in the ovary of Eve, placed there by the
Deity. The lives of all unborn generations were pictured enclosed
in the body of the First Mother in a series of incapsulated embryos
(emboitement), like Chinese boxes one within the other. It was
estimated that, inasmuch as each female had necessarily one less
egg, the original supply given to Eve would last only 200,000,000
generations. After that the race would be extinct.

What led Wolff to reject preformation? How did he know it
was not the truth?

W’’olff had been using the microscope and actually saw and dis-
tinguished cells in both plants and animals. He could find no trace
of incapsulated embryos as Bonnet and Haller imagined. He saw
only cells with not a sign of preformed organs. Cells, Wolff under-

196

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

stood, assimilated food, grew, multiplied, and thus gradually bit by
bit, cell by cell, produced the various tissues and organs of animal
and plant life. Wolff’s views were called epigenesis. To Wolff
epigenesis was not simply an account of the early life history (em-
bryology) of the individual, but a record of the annals of its race.
That is why he called his book Thsoty of Gsnetdtion.

In a world reeking with the dogmas of medieval past, it was
comparatively easy for Haller to block the advanced teachings of
this young doctor. The authority of the Swiss scientist exercised
a paralyzing censorship over Wolff’s ideas. It has been well said
that an opinion is held with a violence inversely proportional to
the amount of evidence which can be adduced in its support. What
finally added to the young man’s complete defeat was the impres-
sive philosophical support given to the preformation doctrine by
Leibnitz.

It took no small courage for so young and uninfluential a scien-
tist to stand against die combined authority of Bonnet, Halier and
Leibnitz. Wolff’s opinions excited the most energetic opposition.
One would like to think that in science there could be no blind
adherence to previous conclusions. Unfortunately it is all too com-
mon. Not only did his opponents accuse him of irreligion, but
they almost completely ruined his chances for a livelihood.

Despite his obscurity, Wolff was right and the opposition egre-
giously OTong. Not preformation but epigenesis approximates the
truth. This is the doctrine that Wolff’s book was the first to bring
forth. It stresses as a fundamental procedure in all organic life,
plants and animals alike, epigenetic growth— that is, a development
in which something appears which was not there before even in
rudiment. Or, to put the same thought in more exact language,
the fertilized egg gives rise to the embryo little by little by the
progressive production of new parts previously nonexistent as such.
Having launched his work in an uncongenial atmosphere, Wolff
was finally forced to leave Berlin. Ugly hostility prevented him from
securing even as much as a small secondary post in any German
university. Disheartened at such antagonism, he finally accepted
an offer from Catherine the Great who invited him to live in
St. Petersburg and become a member of the Russian Academy of

SCHWANN ig7

Sciences. Wolff left Germany never to ref urn. He died in 1794
at the age of sixty-one, a mind sealed up in loneliness.

It was unfortunate both for the career of Wolff and the growth
of science that his ideas met with such sharp opposition. Had it
been otlierwise, Wolff’s teachings would have formed a valuable link
in the actual development of the cell theory. His theory of epigene-
sis and his knowledge of the cell had to be rediscovered at a later
date by other investigators. The penetrative genius that had
enabled Wolff to attain so high a degree of clearness was lost.
Science had to wait until the unwarranted exaggerations of Bonnet,
Haller and Leibnitz, based upon an incomplete perception, died
out before the threads of progress, which Wolff had so carefully
held in his hands, could again be taken up and woven into the
pattern of truth.

The predecessors of Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) helped to
make the time ripe.

It is true that in the early decades of the nineteenth century the
cell had come to be quite universally recognized as a constantly
recurring element in vegetable and animal tissues. Biologists every-
where were groping after some unity underlying the varied phe-
nomena of organic life. Nor was imagination wanting to furnish
an interminable series of speculations. At last came a sharp moment,
a profound comprehension that brought into focus all the prepara-
tory knowledge that went before. This occurred in the mind of
Theodor Schwann. Out of the meshes of faulty generalizations he
disentangled the theory of the cell.

Schwann was bom in Neuss, a little German town not far from
Cologne, the fourth child of a family of thirteen children. The boy
was practically brought up in his father’s book store— a small shop
but a happy place for a boy who loved the quiet calm of a library.
Until the day of his death he kept the gentle and reserved disposi-
tion that he had shown in Neuss, avoiding the bitter academic
controversies that made life unpleasant for his colleagues. After
studying in a Jesuit school at Cologne he passed to the University
of Bonn, where his thoughts were centered on the priesthood, until
he met the anatomist Johannes Muller— a powerful personality
sometimes compared to Haller but much greater as a teacher.

ig8 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Muller (180X-1858) at that time was experimenting with the spinal
nerves of frogs, and when he said to his pupil, Herr Schwann, you
may cut the anterior root,” the youth’s destiny was determined.

After two years spent in medicine at Wurzburg, another great
Catholic university of southern Germany, Schwann matriculated
at Berlin. He was again attracted by Johannes Muller who had been
invited to leave Bonn and accept a more distinguished chair in
the Prussian capital. Immediately upon his graduation Schwann
became Muller’s laboratory assistant.

The assistant’s job was an opportunity, but the salary was miser-
ably small, less than ten dollars per month. Salary or no salary,
Schwann was determined to forge ahead; the association with
Muller was in itself sufficient compensation, for Muller’s will-power
spurred his easygoing and peaceful nature. Under the stimulus of
the master the pupil grew. Possessed of a resourceful investigative
spirit the youtliful scientist from Neuss became the true experimen-
talist, the genuine man of research. His dissertation for the doctor’s
degree dealt with the respiration of the embryo of the chick. Long
ago Malpighi had worked with the chick as a splendid research
object, and now Schwann was carrying on the tradition. Experiment
is a potent instrument to direct ambitions and exercise the reason-
ing powers. When it becomes the medium for a superior intelli-
gence and an active and lofty mind, things are bound to happen.
And they did in this case. Schwann began his excursions into a won-
derland more strange than Alice had discovered. Only with this dif-
ference: the wonderland of Alice wasn’t real.

A description of Schwann in these early Berlin days by one of
his friends helps us to see and understand this serene student of
nature: “He was a man of stature below the medium, with a beard-
less face, an almost infantile and always smiling expression, smooth,
dark brown hair, wearing a fur-trimmed dressing gown, living in
a poorly lighted room on the second floor of a restaurant which
was not even second class. He would pass whole days there with-
out going out, with a few rare books around him, and numerous
glass vessels, retorts, vials, and tubes, simple apparatus which he
made himself. Or, I go in imagination to the dark and fusty halls
of the Anatomical Institute where he used to work till nightfall
by the side of our excellent chief, Johannes Muller. We took our

SCHWANN

dinner in the evening, after the English fashion, so that we might
enjoy more of the advantages of daylight.”

Before he announced to the world the theory of the cell, Schwann
did some elementary work on the alphabet and grammar of biology.
He discovered the fennent of gastric juice to which he gave the
name “pepsin.” He studied bacteria and experimented with the
various phenomena of fermentation, the subject that was to mean
so much to Pasteur in the establishment of the germ theory. No
book on Pasteur fails to mention Schwann, for Pasteur himself very
generously referred to the pioneer work of his German contem-
porary.

Both men had much in common, Schwann being Pasteur’s senior
by twelve years. The great theme of all theory is the search for
relations between things apparently disconnected; in the pursuit
of it men of widely different backgrounds are often brought to-
gether. Both scientists were university trained, sons of poor parents,
the older born in a small German town and the younger in a
French hamlet. Both men were Catholic— sincere, devout, pious. In
them the ideal of religion came into rich fulfillment; for they "were
both possessed of a humility in the unselfish service of science that
is as beautiful as it is rare.

Only once did Schwann clash with the Church. It came towards
the end of his career when he was heavy-laden with honors and
distinctions. Had not the clergy retreated, Schwann was prepared
to face the consequences of his determined stand against supersti-
tion, despite a lifetime of unquestioned loyalty to Catholicism.
The incident revolved around the case of Louise Lateau, the pious
daughter of a Belgian miner. Louise became seriously ill and re-
ceived the last sacrament. However, she did not die but fell into
an ecstasy and developed a case of stigmatization-a pathological
condition due, largely, to mental unbalance. It was claimed that
she had been contemplating the bruises of Jesus Christ with such
fervency that the injuries of her Savior miraculously appeared on
her own body— a supernatural occurrence that excited considerable
attention. A committee was appointed to investigate the Lateau girl
to determine whether her stigmatization was due to natural or
divine causes. Professor Theodor Schwann was asked to be a
member. . ■' ■

SOO ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

After careful investigation it was found that Louise Lateau’s re-
curring bleedings from stigmata were in no way miraculous. They
were due to her own efforts: she frequently rubbed and scratched
with her nails those spots on her body where the blood flowed
and even during her sleep she kept up a highly nervous mechanical
pressure with her fingers to maintain a condition of local conges-
tion. Schwann quickly saw that the case was no miracle, and so did
the rest of the committee. But the clerical press had already spread
the report that Professor Schwann believed that divine forces were
being displayed. Upon the publication of the biologist’s report,
denying the statements that had been erroneously attributed to
him, there broke out a violent attack from the supporters of the
Lateau miracle. They denounced him unmercifully and poured
upon him an incalculable amount of abuse. They had assumed
that he, being a loyal Catholic, would concur with the age-old
belief that stigmatization was an evidence of God’s favor toward
his saints. Had not St. Francis Assisi received Christ’s wounds? And
what of “St. Gertrude of Ostend, Rita of Cascia,* St. Catherine of
Ricci, St. Lidwina? Church history abounds in cases of sacred
stigmata. Was Schwann to deny this type of supernatural manifes-
tation? He did.

Having made his report he refused to answer his critics or respond
to the harsh and vile epithets hurled at him. And so the afiEair
ended.

The linking together of ideas— even simple ideas— is a very com-
plex thing. It is not in a laboratory that problems are solved: they
are solved in the scientist’s head. Other men working under better
conditions than Schwann failed to grasp the full-rounded signifi-
cance of the ceil. But when he announced to the world— “There is
one universal principle of development for the elementary parts of
organisms, however different, and that principle is the formation
of the cells’’— scientific history was made.

In the hands of one man a fact may be comparatively inert, while
another scientist, by the more vigorous activity of his mind, may em-

• The crown of thorns on Rita of Casda’s forehead was simply a drde of
pimples due to smallpox.

SCHWANN

ploy the same fact to effect a powerful comprehension. When Mat-
thias Jacob Schleiden (1804-1881), professor of botany at Jena, vis-
ited Theodor Schwann in Berlin, he spoke enthusiastically about his
work on vegetable cells, especially emphasizing the significance of
the nucleus. (This was an idea he had absorbed from the work
of an English botanist, Robert Brorvn, who actually discovered
the cell-nucleus in 1831,) Schleiden’s after dinner conversation on
the nucleated cells of plants stimulated Schwann to a quick in-
tegration of his own immense and detailed knowledge of animal
tissues. Schwann discovered that the animal organism also consisted
of nucleated cells. The cell, therefore, seemed to him to be the
basic element common to both forms of life.

Schwann was no botanist; he was an anatomist and physiologist
working on animal tissues in Muller’s laboratory in Berlin. But his
specialized knowledge did not prevent his mind running through
the vast accumulation of facts in both fields of thought. With amaz-
ing swiftness and with deep philosophic breadth he formulated the
cell theory which brought together botany and zoology under one
significant generalization: namely, the principle of structural simi-
larity. All organisms, declared Schwann, whether they be vegetal
or animal, represent in the final analysis either single cells or
association of cells. Everywhere in the biologic world the cell is
the unit of structure and the primary agent of biological organi-
zation. Beneath the unending diversity of form and function the
cell alone is the common denominator. It is the smallest complete
unit of structure, the brick from which all living buildings are
made. This doctrine Schwann announced in his now famous book
Mikroskopische Untersuchungen (Microscopic Researches) which
he published in 1839. It was the first clear expression of the cell
theory, thereby enabling Schwann to do for biology what John
Dalton had so memorably achieved, with the atom, for chemistry.
There was no necromancy in this accomplishment of Schwann’s,
no supernatural inspiration, no flight of poetic imagination. Only
logical methods of thoughts which normal individuals regularly
use, so that the truth of it could justly claim universal assent. The
cell theory became at once more than an aid to comprehension. It
was comprehension.

The Schleiden and Schwann relationship presents a striking par-

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ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

allel to the episode of Priestley and Lavoisier. When Priestley
visited the French chemist in Paris he spoke about his discovery
of “de-phlogisticated gas.” In Lavoisier’s mind this gas soon became
“oxygen” and formed the basis of a new theory of combustion,
calcination, and respiration. Lavoisier therefore, not Priestley, be-
came the father of modem chemistry. Schleiden suggested-Schwann
executed. The cell theory is therefore Schwann’s. Any other state-
ment would be misleading. To write, for example, as Samuel Butler
did of Darwin, that “Buffon planted, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck
watered, but it was Mr. Charles Darwin who said: ‘That fruit is
ripe’ and shook it in his lap” is a specimen of erroneous appraisal.

Out of the chiaroscuro of the jungle Schwann stepped into a
clear light. Not in the least is his theoretical ability impaired by
an acknowledged indebtedness to Schleiden. More could be said
about his predecessors than even these pages reveal. Schwann owed
them much, yet he owed them only facts. The great vivifying truth
of the cell is Schwann’s own, the unmistakable result of the com-
prehensive fertility of his mind. “Science is built up of facts as a
house is built up of stones,” observed Poincare in Science and
Hypothesis, “but an accumulation of fact is no more science than
a heap of stones is a house.”

Shortly after the publication of his book Schwann was called
by the University of Louvain to occupy the chair of anatomy. This
recognition of his fame— especially coming from a Catholic insti-
tution-pleased him greatly and he accepted. He left Germany to
spend the rest of his career in Belgium, occasionally visiting his
Rhineland brothers and relatives. After nine happy years at Louvain,
where he spent considerable time and effort learning French and
practicing how to lecture in the adopted language, he was pro-
moted to the University of Liege; the appointment was made in
1847. Here at Liege Schwann remained until his death in 1882, a
span of thirty-five years. Again and again he had been offered posts
in the leading universities of Germany, but he refused to leave
Belgium. “It is not where you are but what you are.”

Humanity advances oh the road of progress by prodigiously un-
equal steps. Oftentimes in this upward march the world pauses

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203

to honor those who have been its truest benefactors. Rarely is it
other than a posthumous tribute. But with Schwann it was differ-
ent: while yet alive, humanity, with deep reverence, extended to
him the laurel wreath.

It happened thus:

At Li6ge on the twenty-third of June, 1878, there was held in
Schwann’s honor “une manifestation solennelle”—a public demon-
stration in recognition of the fortieth anniversary of his book and
the fortieth anniversary of his teaching career. A letter of invitation
to participate in the festivities was sent early in January by the
authorities of the University of Liege to the leading universities
of the world and to all the learned societies of Europe and America.
They were asked to send representatives to honor le celebre auteur
de la Theorie Cellulaire.

After six months of intensive preparation the “manifestation”
was ready. It began promptly at one o’clock in the afternoon of a
beautiful June day in the auditorium of the university which
was appropriately decorated and festooned for the seance. A distin-
guished audience was there to pay homage to this simple man and
unveil his bust, which carried on the pedestal an inscription in
Latin beginning with the words: “Viro summo theodoro schwann”
—a professor in Belgium for forty years, celebrated author of the
cell theory— inventa cellularum doctrina.” Three speeches were
given that afternoon, the first by M. M. Stas, member of the Royal
Academy of Sciences; the second by Doctor Edourd Van Beneden,
professor of the University of Li^ge; and the third by M. Losson,
a student of medicine representing Professor Schwann’s pupils. In
addition to these speeches, which reviewed the history of the cell
theory and Schwann’s leading rdle, tributes, honors, degrees were
conferred upon him by representatives of foreign universities and
learned societies. To all these expressions-temoignages d’admira-
tion, de respect, de reconnaissance— Proiessot Schwann responded.
And he did not forget to pay honor to Matthias Jacob Schleiden.

Of all the many tributes that were presented to him on that day
none stated more clearly and cogently the reasons than those set
forth by the faculty of medicine of the University of Edinburgh.
It is too lengthy a document to quote in its entirety, but these
words, in particular, cannot be forgotten: We gratefully acknowl-

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

204

edge the incalculable service that he rendered to biological science
so long as half a century ago when he penetrated the then seeming
chaos of animal histology, and revealed the great morphological
law, that however diverse in structure and function the several
tissues may be, they are all of them composed of cellular units
variously arranged and variously modified, each xvith a vitality more
or less independent. We are aware that in so doing Schwann elabo-
rated and applied to animal histology the cell theory previously
enunciated by Schleiden with regard to the tissues of plants; but
w-e recognize how infinitely more difficult it was to prove that the
theory also holds in the case of animal tissues for the investigation
of which he had to rely on technical methods of a very primitive
character. More refined methods of research have indeed led to
different opinions regarding the essential constitution of the cellu-
lar unit, but this point of detail has in no degree shaken the funda-
mental principle of the cell theory.”

The ultimate subdivision of living tissue into individual cells
marked an entirely new departure in understanding the structure
of plants and animals.* A grander era, studded by brilliant judg-
ments brilliantly delivered, was on its way.

Hardly had the cell theory been formulated when its elaboration
tvas begun by a group of research investigators who added new
corollaries to the main thesis, thereby placing the theory in a far
more significant light tlian either Schleiden or Schwann had
dreamed of. These younger men succeeded in demonstrating that
the key to every biological problem must finally be sought in the
cell. This is an amazing disclosure when one stops to consider the
range and diversity of phenomena they had to bring under a single
point of view. Certainly it could not have been done had they
not been in possession of Schwann’s theory.

Once having discovered the universal importance of the cell
the biologists undertook an attack upon its interior structure, in

* A group of similar cells devoted to a single use is called a tissue. There are
many kinds of tissues sudi as bone, muscle, nerve, etc. The main idea of
Schwann was to unify the plmt and animal world by showing that cell stractirre
is at the basis of all tissue.

SCHWANN 205

much the same way that the followers of Dalton explored the realm
within the atom.

What did they find?

They came upon a complex living system containing many struc-
tural components highly differentiated and of profound chemical
diversity. Foremost, they discovered protoplasm, a translucent,
grayish, slimy substance possessing extraordinary uniformity in both
animal and plant cells. When stained and seen under high magnifi-
cation, it appears to be somewhat granular or finely netted. Within
the protoplasm is the denser central portion called the nucleus,
separating itself by a recognizable membrane. Physically, it is much
the same as the protoplasm; it differs only in its chemical consti-
tution. Chemically, the protoplasm is three-fourths water. The other
fourth is made up largely of protein, sugars, fats, and salts. It is
in the protein complex of the protoplasm that scientific research
is endeavoring to unravel the ultimate properties of that elusive
thing called Life.

During the early period of exploration that was to reveal many
new discoveries within the cell, one question always remamed
uppermost in the minds of biologists: “How does a ceil arise— what
is the true story of its origin?” Both Schleiden and Schwann bravely
faced this problem, but their answer was erroneous and mislead-
ing. They declared that cells spring into being most commonly by
a process of “free cell-formation”— that is, cells arise de novo by
“budding” from the surface of the nucleus.

A versatile young Swiss botanist, Karl Nageli (1817-1891), who
had spent a part of his academic career working under Schleiden
at Jena, undertook a microscopical examination of the processes
of cell-formation in order to get light on the subject of the origin
and growth of this universal biologic unit. By nature and cultiva-
tion Nageli was an unrestrainable theorist. But first and foremost
he was an investigator who had plunged deep into experiment.
The question of tire origin of the cell was just the kind of a
problem to challenge his mind. After several years of close and
incessant work Nageli emerged from his laboratory in 1846 to
tell the world that no such thing as “free cell-formation” takes
place; on the contrary no nucleus buds from cells. All of his
researches and observations, declared Nageli, proved that a cell

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

206

arises from another pre-existing cell by “division” only; that is,
a cell by dividing into two halves forms two cells, where there had
been but one before. The two cells become distinct. Then as growth
proceeds, by a continuous process of subdivision, the two cells
divide into four, the four into eight, the eight into sixteen, and
so on, each resulting cell doubling in size and dividing in two,
until the multitude of cells builds up the body of the embryo
and finally of the adult.

Other men in the field of botany— scientists like Kolliker and
Hugo von Mohl— arrived almost simultaneously at the same conclu-
sion. And so did the zoologists. Within twenty years after Schwann
had published his book, the universality of “cell-division” was estab-
lished as the one and only process by which cells come into being.
Never do cells arise de novo— that is, spontaneously out of some
formless matrix.

Knowing that the cells of the body arise only by division of
pre-existing cells, it is easy to understand the broad outlines of
the theory of heredity: “A new life is only a piece of material sepa-
rated from its parents— a chip off the old block.”

In i86t the German anatomist, Karl Gegenbaur (1826-1903),
starting out from the doctrine Omne vive e vivo— “All life from
life”— tore the veil from a mystery of nature which for thousands
of years confronted humanity as unapproachable— the mystery of
the ovum. Gegenbaur demonstrated that the fertilized egg is a
single cell. (The human ovum is almost a thousand times the bulk
of an average human tissue-cell.) Schwann had vaguely recognized
this fact, but it was left for Gegenbaur in a new odyssey of dis-
covery to establish it more carefully than any previous scientist.

Other observations on the cellular phenomena of sexual union
showed that in both the plant and animal kingdoms the sexual
process is nothing more than the union of a male cell with a
female cell which creates the single new cell or fertilized egg.
From this egg-embryo, formed by the union of ovum and sper-
matazoon, the organism develops. Consequently, within the micro-
scopic compass of the single (ancestor) cell there is contained the
total hereditary endowment of each individual— plant or animal—

SCHWANN 207

which is transmitted from parents to offspring. Thus the continuity
between generations is in reality a continuity of cells.

If the ancestor cell (the egg) contains no preformed embryo,
what then does it contain? Surely it must contain something by
which characteristics are transmitted. Kaspar Friedrich Wolff could
not answer this question, neither could Schwann. But the answer
is surprisingly definite. Within the nucleus there was discovered
a substance called chromatin, particularly rich in phosphorus. When
a cell is stained for microscopic study' there can be seen in the
nucleus strands of this material. At the time of reproduction the
chromatin breaks up into a definite number of rodlike bodies
termed chromosomes. Evidence points to these chromosome bodies
as the express vehicles of heritage transmission.

The private affairs of the chromosomes, so long a secret, have
yielded to tedious years of labor. Chromosomes have been tracked
down; they occur in all cells of all plants and animals and they
are constant in number and appearance for any given species. More-
over, they pass directly from parents to their offspring. Some
creatures are provided with many chromosomes and some with few.
Man, for example, has a set of forty-eight, a lily twenty-four, a
mouse forty, a pea fourteen, the roundworm Ascaris only two, and
a certain crustacean over a hundred. Every kind of creature has its
own characteristic chromosome outfit. The set varies from species
to species. In reproduction, half of the chromosomes are supplied
by the father and the other half by the mother. This is accomplished
by a remarkable process which prevents a doubling of the sets.
Heredity is therefore a fifty-fifty proposition. Every human being
starts life as a single cell— the center of him (or her) occupied by
two complete sets of twenty-four of these chromosomes, one set
transmitted from each parent.

The exploration of the cell has kept pace with the penetration
of the atom. The search which started out centuries ago with a
study of the tissues was transferred to the cell, then to the proto-
plasm, then to the nucleus, which yielded the secrets of chromatin,
and in turn made possible the discovery of chromosomes. The
next giant step in biology was taken when the chromosomes were
declared to be the habitation of genes-very small bodies having

the nature of atoms even though they belong to a world beyond
visibility. Similarly the genes. Unless their existence were assumed
the facts of heredity could not be explained. There is indeed “a
mask of theory over the whole of nature, if it be theory to infer
more than tve see.” •

The theory of the chromosome and the gene explains the experi-
mental work of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), cloistered scientist,
who worked alone in the garden of the Augustinian Monastery at
Brno in Moravia, which is now a part of Czechoslovakia. The
intellectual curiosity of this remarkable man went beyond idle
wonderment. Mendel experimented with plants, particularly the
common culinary pea.

His procedure was to hybridize different varieties within a related
species and note the results. He found that certain characteristics
were transmitted from parents to offspring. Not haphazardly, but
in definite numerical proportions.

Of the pea, Mendel had in his garden many varieties: one type
had a relatively long stem while another had a short one, one was
characterized by having a white flower and another a red flower;
in one the unripe pods were green, in another yellow. By numerous
and often-repeated experiments extending over several years Mendel
produced results in crossing that were capable of statistical formu-
lation. This method was an altogether new approach to the subject
of heredity which no previous breeder of plants or animals had
ever attempted.

It is one thing to utilize science and quite another thing to
advance it. In order to explain the results Mendel assumed that
somewhere in the plants’ hereditary constitution there were “units”
which controlled or determined this or that “character.” If a pea
plant, for example, was tall, Mendel reasoned that “tallness” as a
unit character must be inherent in its endowment. When he crossed
it with a short pea plant, all the offspring of the first generation
turned out to be tall. These hybrids were then allowed to self-

SCHWANN

209

fertilize and their seeds collected. Some of the seeds produced tall
plants, others produced short plants, in the ratio of three tall to
one short.

What did this mean?

Mendel rightly reasoned that tallness was dominant— where tw'O
characters of a pair meet in an individual one of them masks or
dominates the other. In this particular case “smallness” is there-
fore a recessive unit character— not destroyed but just held back.
Further experiments with the offspring of the hybrids showed that
smallness was there in a latent condition, for it appeared again
and again in subsequent generations. In theorizing on these unit
characters Mendel argued that, inasmuch as they did not mix with
each other (that is, tliey did not in any way adulterate each other
by intimacy), they must be self-perpetuating.

Mendel’s discoveries apply not only to hybrids but also to all
normal processes. The units which he discovered in the solitude
of his garden are today known by the name of genes. It is because
of the existence of the genes and their frequent mutation that nature
is able to carry on (a) the process of heredity and (b) the process
of variation. In other words, the gene is the smallest unit of con-
tinuity and change. Like the electron within the atom, it is, in our
present state of knowledge, ultimate wnthin the cell.

A very good example of how a Mendelian character operates in
man is “night blindness,” a peculiarity of the retina that makes it
difficult for the human eye to see in twilight or in other dim light.
This defect zigzags to and fro between the generations. In tlie time
of Charles I one Jean Nougaret is known to have been afflicted with
night blindness, and this trouble has recurred in his descendants
for more than three hundred years. If a normal member of the
Nougaret lineage married a normal type, none of the offspring were
night-blind. But if a night-blind member of the lineage married a
normal type, the night blindness cropped up in the descendants
in definite proportions.

The basic laws of heredity discovered in the plant and animal
world are, of course, applicable to man.

For man does not stand apart from nature, as was so long be-
lieved by the theologians, but he is a part of nature, as science has

210

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

carefully and laboriously demonstrated. The cellular origin of all
living things holds true for man as it does for all living things,
just as a geranium or a fish or a horse transmit to their offspring
unit character through the chromosomes within the nucleus of the
cell, so does man transmit his biological inheritance to his children.

Man, hovrever, is a complex creature who, unfortunately, knows
less about himself than he does of his corn and horses. More than
half a century ago, Francis Gal ton perceived the fundamental im-
portance of biological knowledge applied to a long range view of
humanity and its future. But the innate conservatism of the human
mind is such that we are pitifully small in the presence of great
and new revelations.

Still, the foundations of this new temple of heredity have been
laid. Some day it will be crowned with polished minarets.

9. Darwin . . theory of evolution

THE question of the origin of life-perhaps the most primeval of
all questions— is as old as man himself, for early in the childhood
of the race there came the promptings of natural curiosity. Many
of the answers that have come down to us, embodied in oriental
myth and legend, are extremely naive; they are the crude products
of man’s early thinking such as might be expected from infant
peoples making the first tiny exploration of the complexity of the
universe.

When we leave the Orient and come to the thinkers of ancient
Greece we are in the presence of men who gave surprisingly good
answers to this age-old question. W^hereas the peoples of the far-
eastern lands spoke of the origin of life in semipoetical terms full
of racial and religious mysticism, the Greek attempts at explanation
represent the very earliest beginnings of a scientific approach. Be-
cause of their genius these early Greek thinkers have been called
“evolutionists before Darwin.”

As a scientific theory evolution is essentially a product of the last
one hundred years. It is, therefore, somewhat extravagant to call
men like Thales and Anaximander evolutionists in our modern
sense. While tire best minds of antiquity made some splendid
guesses, as, for example, Empedocles of Agrigentum who imagined
(and rightly) that plants preceded animals in the evolutionary
chain, and that less perfect forms gave way to more perfect, still
even to these best minds there was little incongruity in the idea
of animals and plants arising de novo from water or earth.

So illustrious a thinker as Aristotle apparently accepted widi
little reservation the statements of his predecessors that such highly
developed organisms as worms, insects and some fishes could come
into being from mud. This is the doctrine of “spontaneous gen-

212

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

eration,” according to which fully formed living organisms some-
times arise from nonliving matter. It is also true of Aristotle, that
while he believed organic life is built upon a progressive scale of
complexity ranging from simple forms to highly developed ones
(with man crowning the whole system), he was unable to point to
any natural agency w'hich could account for the interrelation of
living things.

Following the downfall of Greece the glorious period of specu-
lative thinking came to an end. For more than twenty centuries
not a single new idea on the subject of the origin of life was brought
forxvard. Over and over again we find the scholars, theologians, and
poets of medieval Europe voicing the semioriental views of the
Bible: that all species are fixed (immutable), each having come into
existence by a special act of creation. Thus, in the second chapter
of Genesis, the Deity is pictured as taking a clod of earth in His
hands and, in a very literal way, holding it close to His nostrils so
as to breathe into it the breath of life:

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became
a living soul (Genesis 2:7).

Inasmuch as the modern theory of evolution is based upon the
mutability of species, it can easily be understood that no one during
the long stretch of medievalism deserves to be called an evolutionist.
Throughout this period there was a complete stagnation of knowl-
edge about nature. If men were not quoting the Bible directly,
they went about saying that various types of animals arise frotn
fermentation. Or they firmly declared that a dead horse breeds
wasps, a mule produces hornets, cheese gives birth to mice.

Such were the prevalent ideas on the origin of life before the
Renaissance.

One day in the year 1668 an Italian naturalist who was not at
all content with tradition began to put his faith in observation, Not-
withstanding the fact that people had been saying for centuries
that decaying animal matter gives rise to life forms, this young

DARWIN

213

man thought that it would be best to test such a statement with
a series of actual observations. One may well imagine how terribly
silly it must have appeared to the sober-minded people of Tuscany
to watch Francesco Redi toiling under the Italian sun with meat
and maggots to satisfy a scientific curiosity.

But Redi was determined to know. He covered meat with fine
gauze and exposed it to flies. The meat did not develop maggots,
quite simply because the flies laid their eggs on the gauze, not on
the meat: maggots could not develop on meat unless the flies’ eggs
were deposited directly on the meat!

Thus in one experiment the folly of centuries of belief was over-
thrown. Redi proved for all time that the supposed generation of
life from putrefied matter was wholly untrue. On the positive side
his experiment showed that no form of life arises except from pre-
existing life.

It would be a mistake to think that Redi’s work was accepted all
at once. His influence only gradually became apparent.

Slowly and very painfully the book of nature was being forced
open. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the beginnings
of embryology, which was to add conclusive proof to the doctrine
of evolution; of comparative anatomy, the source of Darwin’s earli-
est beliefs in the mutability of species; of microscopy, which would
bring into the evolutionary spotlight more and more conclusive
analogies of structure and function to fill out the vast picture of the
unfolding of organic nature.

It was a period of hesitating progress.

Gottfried Leibnitz, the German philosopher, brought forward the
idea of continuity, of a successive chain of species, ascending in
direct line. This concept was to dominate evolutionary thought
until Lamarck should realize that the ascent had been in branching
lines. Ren^ Descartes, treading softly lest he should come under tlie
iron hand of the Church, said that in all probability nature could
be explained by natural laws instead of by divine revelation. Spinoza
in Holland, Pascal in France, Newton and Hume in England, were
the leaders of thought who saw that there had been evolution, but
wondered how it bad all come about. Men cannot advance much

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

214

beyond the knowledge of their time, and the biological knowledge
of those days was fragmentary, to say the least.*

But this state of affairs was not to endure. The eighteenth cen-
tury marked the transition. It inaugurated a period full of impor-
tant advances in the accumulation of facts with the consequent
leavening of men’s ideas. The scientific method of observation from
nature znd induction from observation was slowly infiltrating into
the thought of the age. The real type of theorizing man, who would
be content to let his speculation wait upon his knowledge, was in
the process of becoming.

First there arose Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist, who both-
ered hardly at all xvith generalizations. He set for himself the pro-
digious task of systematizing nature, for he was a master in the
art of classifying living things. No biologist before him possessed
such a methodical approach. In his zeal for naming and classifying,
the high goal of investigation was lost sight of. While he studied
an extraordinary large number of animals, he unfortunately
brought no deepening of our knowledge.

Linnaeus assumed that when the Deity created the world He
stocked this earth with fixed and invariable species— that is, one
pair of each kind of animals was created. Believing this, he assumed
that existing species were the direct descendants without change of
form or habit from the original pair. Because of the weight of his
great influence this assumption helped to establish the dogma of the
fixity of species. It is remarkable that, having been such a staunch
believer in immutability, he veered toward the end of his career
somewhat to the other side by admitting that a species might
through hybridization degenerate into many varieties.

While Linnaeus was laboring at his tasks in Sweden and subse-
quently in Holland, there appeared in England a long didactic
poem called The Zoonomia which created a minor sensation. It

* The word evolution itself was put into circulation in the eighteenth century
by Charles Bonnet, who might have made significant contributions to biology if
his eyesight had not failed him at the age of thirty-four, forcing him to abandon
the direct observation of nature for the fanciful and deceptive paths of imagina-
tion.

DARWIN

■215

, .was ■ written by Erasmus Daridn, ' the^ grandfather : of .the future'

. theorist. He had been profoundly touched by the newer attitude':
. toward nature and in this poem boldly speculated on the origi:ii and
'■ evolution of, life. In many curious ways he anticipated, the Ideas of
his iamous grandson. He mentioned, for example, the strug,gie for
existence, the origin of all nature from a single source, sexual selec-
. tion of the stronger and most attractive males by the .females, and
the idea of mimicry or protective coloration.. The chief factor of
evolution according to Erasmus Darwin, however, was increased ■
^ use or disuse of certain organs, the effects of which were transmis-
sible to the offspring; and these changes were the consequence of
,' the desires, aversions, pleasures, pains, irritations and other inherent
propensities of the animals themselves. Unfortunately for Erasmus
Darwin his views were far too advanced for his time. Those who
ridiculed him, although now forgotten, were at least victors for
i a day.

I What happened to Erasmus Darwin in England happened in
^ France to George Buffon, who for fifty-odd years had been investi-
' gating the problem of the origin of species. Buffon promulgated a
theory that declared for mutability, the struggle for existence, and
the inheritance of acquired characters. Poor Buffon! His fellow
members of the faculty of the Sorbonne turned on him; he was
threatened with the loss of his position, with ostracism and igno-
miny. Finally he capitulated. He published a recantation ending
j with the words: “I abandon everything in my book respecting the
formation of the earth and generally all which may be contrary
to the narrative of Moses.*’

Despite Buffon’s tremendous scientific influence the biblical doc-
trine of special creation had so strong a hold that as great a zoologist
as Baron de Cuvier could not possibly shake it. While Cuvier recog-
nized that there must have been successive geological epochs in the
development of life on earth (catastrophic upheavals marking the
separation between the successive epochs), he steadfastly refused
I to believe that there had been a mutability of species. Consequently
'I he rejected and ridiculed the whole principle of evolution*

2i6

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

During tliose days in France there lived an obscure professor who
was singularly untouched by Baron de Cuvier s ridicule.

Outside of his views on evolution there w^as nothing very eventful
about the life of Jean Baptiste de Lamarck. Having arrived in his
quiet way at certain very definite ideas on the origin of species,
he was willing to endure ostracism, obscurity and poverty to pro-
mulgate what he felt to be the truth. The little recognition he
received during his life was buried with him in a pauper’s grave.

It is often asked why Lamarck met with such meager recogni-
tion. Why did the publication of his views excite only a flurry
of comment, whereas Darwin’s, published fifty years later, succeeded
in arresting the attention of the entire world?

Lamarck’s views were legitimate enough; in fact, Darwin adopted
many of the Lamarckian arguments in the later editions of the
Ongm of Species. It was unfortunate that Lamarck’s method of
formulating his views was wrong; he failed to test his abstractions
in the light of careful observation and experiment. His method
frequently led him into ridiculous and weird deductions which
canceled through their absurdity all the value his sounder work
had for his contemporaries.

Lamarck postulated four laws in summing up his view of how
evolution had come about. These laws are; i. Life tends to increase
the volume of each living body and of all its parts up to a limit
determined by its own necessities. 2. New wants in animals give rise
to new organs. 3. The development of these organs is in proportion
to their employment. 4. New developments may be transmitted to
offspring.

The first law may be conceded, although Lamarck adduced
meager evidence for its validity. The third law, that the use of an
organ causes it to increase in size (and its disuse to atrophy), Darwin
later admitted as a factor in organic evolution. The fourth law, that
of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, was at least as old
as Aristotle, and this law Darwin also included as a possible con-
tributing factor.

But it was the second law that was the keynote of Lamarck’s

DARWIN 217

theory, and it was this law that was the occasion for the ridicule
and the wholesale rejection of his entire scheme.

Simply put, this law means that a want, or a need, or a propensity
in an animal causes the origin of a new organ. Giraffes, said La-
marck, acquired long necks because they “wanted” them, in order
to browse off the high branches of the trees in the jungle.

The misinterpretation of Lamarck lay in the word “wanted.”

What he intended to say was this: that the ancestors of the
giraffes needed {avoir besoin) long necks, and that the gradual
stretching of tire neck towards the high branches finally produced
this effect. But the critics of Lamarck were not kindly men. They
were out to make their enemy look ridiculous and so they lost no
time in assuming that Lamarck meant that the ancestors of the
giraffes actually and consciously decided that they would be better
off with long necks and thereupon went about acquiring them.

To make matters worse, Lamarck boldly insisted that it rvas a
demonstrable fact that bulls originally acquired horns, because in
anger they butted their heads together and that a rush of nervous
fluid to the butted parts followed, in which there was secreted an
osseous or bony material gradually resulting in the production of
horns. Lamarck assigned a similar cause for the branching antlers
of the stag. Snakes, he said, sprang from reptiles with four feet,
but snakes grew longer because of continual effort to elongate them-
selves in order to push through narrow places.

In many respects Lamarck was a bad scientist: he gave more
attention to a priori speculations and fanciful hypotheses than to
the direct observation of nature. Yet Lamarck made a definite con-
tribution to evolutionary theory.

He was the first evolutionist clearly to realize that the lines
of biological descent were branching instead of a single chain. He
was the first to publish a genealogical tree, showing that the rela-
tionships between present day species were not those of direct
descent, but that they shared a common (extinct) progenitor.
Lamarck also was the first to insist that for any sort of evolution,
no matter what the factors, much more time must be allotted to
nature to enact her laws than had been commonly assigned. He
thereby demonstrated that the age of the earth must be much

greater than any previous estimate had allowed. \ ^ .

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

218

But the chief glory of Lamarck is that of a lone man of science
waging a battle against tradition, dogmatism and convention.

Nor is he to be condemned too severely for the fanciful nature
of many of his hypotheses. Whatever checks an evolutionist, writing
in 1 800, might bring to bear upon his speculations necessarily had
to come from himself. No careful scientific thinking existed in
biology at that time to guide the theorizer. Lamarck is perhaps
to be praised more for such restraint as he did exercise than to
be condemned for the lack of it. Consider, for example, the ideas
of some of his predecessors, such as Claude Duret, who described
a tree that stood on the edge of a lake. Its leaves, as they fell, Duret
tells us, were metamorphosed into either fishes or birds, according
as they struck water or land! Or take Kircher of Amsterdam, who
swore that he saw with his own eyes orchids giving birth to birds
and “small men,” through fertilization with a mysterious spermatic
fluid given off by the ground. Compared to these and others of his
sources in the evolutionary discussion, Lamarck was a veritable
prodigy of self-restraint.

Although he had stated the concept of evolution in clearer terms
than any man before him and marshaled in support of the doctrine
more facts and logic, Lamarck died leaving virtually no impression
on his own generation.

The reasons for this are not far to seek. Besides Lamarck’s tend-
ency to unscientific hypotheses, which we have already discussed,
such evidence as he possessed was full of gaps. These gaps were to
be largely filled in by a host of discoveries of the next few years
in embryology, paleontology, comparative anatomy and botany. All
these gaps in his evidence Lamarck unfortunately attempted to fill
in wdth figments of his own imagination. The consequences
were sad.

The Philosophie Zoologique, Lamarck’s crowning work, was pub-
lished in 1809. It appeared, but nobody read it. The date however
is memorable for in that same year was born the classical theorist
of evolution— Charles Robert Darwin.

8 '

After the death of Lamarck in 1829, evolution receded into dis-
favor and neglect. There were plenty of men, though, who bore in

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219

the corners of their minds a conception of evolution, or at least
a queer feeling that all of nature was not quite as patly and easily
explained as ecclesiastical authorities maintained. Thomas Huxley
was assiduously at work trying to uncover a law of evolution he
felt must exist. Charles Lyell, the geologist, was frankly puzzled by
the conflict between his own observations and the prevailing belief
in the biblical doctrine of special creations. Joseph Hooker, the
botanist, was at a loss to explain the variety in the geographic dis-
tribution of plants by any other means than descent with modifica-
tion; and even Richard Owen, successor of Cuvier, conceded some-
what guardedly the transmutation of species.

And it is important to remember concerning Charles Darwin
that, before he conceived his theory, he was just another naturalist
pondering the facts of the animal and plant worlds and wondering
more and more why those facts should persistently run counter to
current doctrines. Until Darwin’s work had been made known, no
evolutionist, no matter how convinced by the data collected, drought
that there was sufficient evidence at hand to warrant any man’s
braving public disapproval. The storm winds of this disapproval
would blotv from two quarters: the theologians who were ready
to hurl octavo Bibles at the heads of all who disputed special crea-
tion, and the contemporary scientists themselves wffio were waiting
with that eternal question “’What proofs?” So the evolutionists of
the early part of the nineteenth century held their peace and cher-
ished their hypotheses, hoping that the day would not be too far
distant when some naturalist would present a fresh set of considera-
tions and establish evolution upon a secure basis of fact.

In the meantime the foes of evolution were digging in and con-
solidating their position. Soon there appeared the Bridgewater
Treatises, a series of essays by many prominent naturalists of the
time who rationalized the viewpoint of special creation, pointing
out the marvelous adaptations the Deity had created in natm'e.
The authoritative work of William Paley on natural theology also
concerned itself with this aspect of the creative process. Nothing
seemed to the naturalist of the first half of the century more
immutable than the belief in the immutability of species. Yet there
ran be seen even in these essays the germs of the inevitable triumph
of evolution. The Bridgewater series stressed adaptation, as did

220 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Paley, and such is the irony of things that the identical examples
they gave to demonstrate special creation were to be repeated by
evolutionists half a century later as evidence for the new doctrine!

The earliest record we have of Darwin’s propensity for the investi-
gation of nature tells us that at the age of ten he noticed the varying
types of insects and contemplated collecting them. Some of his
enthusiasm in this direction was dampened by an incident one day,
when, with a newly caught beetle in each hand, he discovered yet
another specimen of a rare and interesting species. He could not
bear to give up either of his first two prizes, yet he had to have the
third. Deciding quickly, he put one of the beetles between his teeth,
holding it there as gently as possible. With his right hand he reached
for the third tempting specimen and had it in his fingers when
the beetle between his teeth inconsiderately squirted acid into his
mouth and escaped with both his fellows, while the young ento-
mologist frantically ran for a glass of water to cool his burning
throat.

The profession of a naturalist appealed to Darwin as he grew
older, but the prospect of finding a position where he might be
able to do some really useful work appeared slender. His father
thought the young man’s bent just a hobby and wanted him to be
a physician like hiinself and like old Erasmus Darwin before him.
But he showed little inclination for medical work. The next, and
inevitable, suggestion was the ministry. The problem rested there
while Darwin went to Edinburgh and Cambridge where he con-
tinued in his apparently directionless existence observing the life
of plants and animals, familiarizing himself with the facts of
geology, finding his greatest pleasure in the study of outdoor things.
Each day he showed less and less evidence of enthusiasm for the
vocation of clergyman. When he reached twenty-two he was still
undecided what to do with his life, so he had to accept tacitly his
family’s decision.

Then out of the clear blue came the offer of a lifetime: an
appointment as naturalist to the government ship, H.M.S. Beagle,
which was to make an extended voyage through the southern half
of the New World, Atixiovisly he submitted the offer for his father’s

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approval. It was not at once forthcoming; the senior Darwin thought
that such a trip would hardly comport with the dignity of a
clergyman-to-be. Fearing that the offer might be withdrawn, the
youthful naturalist begged for quick acquiescence. At last consent
was given, but only after Charles’ uncle had interceded for him,
saying that he thought the “pursuit of Natural History, though
certainly not professional, is very suitable to a clergyman.”

The Beagle sailed from England on December 27, 1831, made its
way down the coast of Europe to Africa and arrived at Teneriffe
on the sixth of January. Fear of the cholera kept the expedition
from landing; but ten days later they disembarked at St. lago, the
chief island of the Cape Verde archipelago. During these first few
days of the voyage the sea had been rough, and Darwin was experi'
encing the beginnings of the chronic nervous indigestion that was
to torment him for the rest of his life. It took the form of violent
seasickness which rarely left him for the rest of the five-year voyage.
There were other discomforts that were to beset him on this trip
—heat, bad weather, pestiferous insects, fatiguing expeditions and
a growing homesickness— all of which were stoically endured for
the sake of observation.

Toward the middle of February the Beagle made its way across
the Atlantic and finally landed in Brazil. Here Darwin’s real inves-
tigations began. At every anchorage, as the ship slowly worked its
way down tire east coast of South America to the Straits of Magellan
and up the west coast to Valparaiso and the Galapagos Islands,
young Darwin was among the first ashore with his butterfly net,
geologic hammer, magnifying glass and other implements of the
naturalist. Between ports, in spite of recurring spells of seasickness,
he observed the sea birds and the marine animals that could be seen
from the ship. Everything he came across he wrote down in his
now famous Journal during those long evenings when his mind
seethed with all manner of hypotheses and possible explanations
in an attempt to arrive at a logical theory which would make under-
standable the interrelations among the many phenomena he had
witnessed.

One particular point troubled him - consistently. If these various

2^2 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

species he came across were the specially created offspring of a
divine Hand, why then was there so much dissimilarity between
the individuals of each species? Why were there so many individual
differences? Why could he find no two members of a species exactly
alike? Could it be that each individual was created separately? How

else account for such variation? _

Furthermore there was the puzzling matter of how to distin-
guish between species and variety. What constituted a species?
What a variety? Hitherto the consensus of ^ opinion among nata-
ralists had been that the matter of quantity must be the chief
criterion— that is, if the number of a variety was large enough,
it constituted a species. But Darwin found variety and species so
interlocking that it was hard to discern the details that made them

distinct. .

The next year, while on an expedition to the Andes Mountains,

he discovered the mice on opposite sides of the range were quite
different. It did not occur to him then and there that such a thing
as the mutability of species was the explanation. But here was a
puzzling problem! What caused variation? Why did the mice on
one side of the Andes vary in one way and the species on the other
side in another? Here was a significant problem which could not be
solved with the meager facts at hand. He would have to leave the
solution of variation in abeyance until he could gather material
to support an hypothesis.

Late in 1835 the Beagle left the shores of Peru for an excursion
to the Galapagos Archipelago, which lay about six hundred miles
west of South America. Several days were spent there w-hile Darwin
gathered notes on the new species he came across. Sitting at his
desk in the evenings, comparing his specimens with those he had
collected on the continent, he was struck by the remarkable resem-
blance between them. Were these birds and reptiles of Galapagos
members of the same species, created simultaneously on island
and continent? No, that couldn’t be true, since the resemblance
did not extend to all details, but only lay in the general form.
But why would species be created so similar to each other, and yet
not the same? If the birds and reptiles of the islands were identical
with those of the mainland (or if they were completely different),
then the conventional biblical doctrine of special creation would

DARWIN

22g

account for them. But neither was the case! These island forms
seemed allied to those of the continent, but were neither identical
nor yet distinct.

Here was a fine state of affairs! Neither identical nor distinct.
What was one to make of that? Obviously special creation was not
the answer. There must have been variations; these birds must
have migrated at one time or another from the mainland, and by
some sort of modification have diverged from their original char-
acter. Or else the islands had once been connected with the main-
land only to be severed by geologic forces, thereby isolating the
animals. He could see no other explanation. For that reason there
was no other course left for Darwin but to abandon once and for
all the concept of the fixity of species and apply the hypothesis of
variability. “It was evident that such facts as these, as well as many
others, could only be explained on the supposition that species
gradually become modified; and the subject haunted me.”

It turned out to be an excellent working formula. Observations
that had long puzzled him seemed to be adequately explained by
it. For example, there were the Andean mice. Nature had modified
them under different conditions; hence they had become diverse
in character. He remembered also that animals and plants on the
Cape Verde Islands, the scene of his first observ'ations of the voyage,
showed the same peculiarity as the Galapagos group— that is, the
species w'ere allied to but distinct from those of the mainland. Time
and again he pondered on the almost imperceptible gradation ex-
isting between the various species. Wherever he traveled he noticed
that one species graded into another. Added to all this was his
experience with fossil forms picked up here and there. The huge
fossils he had unearthed in Patagonia were strikingly similar to
living specimens. Obviously fossils must be ancestors of existing
life forms.

The swift joy of discovery now began to thrill him.

On his return home, there was no longer any que-stion that his
would be the career of a naturalist. , “The voyage of the Beagle,”
Darwin wrote in his autobiography years afterward, “has been by

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

224

far the most important event in my life, and has determined my
whole career.” And so it did.

The Beagle reached England on October 2, 1836. Darwin spent
many long months preparing his “notes” for publication. In reality
these notes were a journal, a day by day running account of his
observations. What had been his private and exclusive property
was now given to humanity under the title Journal of Researches
mto the Natural History and Geology of the Countries visited dur-
ing the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle around the World. The appear-
ance of the Journal gave young Darwin a prominent position among
men of science.

In January, 1839, the future tireorist married his cousin, Emma
Wedgwood, that wonderful woman who stood by him throughout
the years of his illness. Almost immediately after the marriage
the invalidism that dogged him all his life began to plague his
health unremittingly. Rather quickly he gave up the idea of living
in London and established himself in the small suburb of Down,
in the county of Kent. It was here that he wrote the Origin of
Species after twenty years of painstaking work in the face of chronic
neurosis and chronic indigestion and long spells of nausea that
confined him to bed for weeks at a time.

In spite of long periods of physical distress he managed to carry
on investigations in many fields of science, never allowing any ex-
cursion into other domains to draw him from the one central job
of his life: to seek for a natural cause to explain the origin of species.
His passion was to collect facts bearing on the idea of modification.

It is said of Darwin that he found the world unexplored and with
thoroughness explored it. Always the careful scientist, he took espe-
cial care to note the facts that seemed to contradict his theories;
he had noticed that it was these unpleasant data that were most
apt to escape the memory. But as the facts on variation came crowd-
ing into his notebooks the inevitability of the idea of evolution
impressed itself on him with greater and greater force.

Already on the Beagle he had given the subject of modification
a great deal of careful thought. Now that he was back in England
he began to consider the vast amount of data that might be gleaned

DARWIN 285

from a study of variation under domestication,— that is, the differ-
ences between domestic and wild species of dogs, poultry, cattle
and plants. That should give him much material with which to
solve the problem of variability. Of course, modification in these
cases would be the result of selection by professional breeders, who
sought to perpetuate favorable variations by mating the animals
showing them. The whole problem of variations, their accumulation
to form modifications, and the adaptation of animals to their
environment through these modifications would repay his careful
study.

So Darwin went about the countryside talking to professional
breeders of domestic animals and plants, horticulturists, cattlemen,
farmers, cat and dog fanciers. He put questions to each of them:
what qualities did they breed for, how successful tvere they in per-
petuating them, what were the especial virtues of hybrids, how did
domesticated species differ from wild? He learned that it was com-
paratively easy for breeders to modify a domestic species within
a few generations (British cattlemen for example had improved the
quality of cattle and sheep to a marked degree within a short time
and race horse trainers had so improved the original stock of
Arabian horses that pure Arabians had to be given handicaps in
the races). Wherever he inquired he saw instances of man’s ability
to improve nature by artificial selection. Domestic breeders had
produced better grades of cattle and sheep. So Darwin jotted down
in his notebook that “the power of this principle of selection is not
hypothetical.”

Frets kept filling up one notebook after another, as Darwin
probed deeper into the mystery. “It is delightful to have many
points fermenting in one’s brain.” He could not escape mutability.
But still he jotted down every single item that might possibly dis-
prove that view. Meanwhile, however, he searched for the explana-
tion of modification and carefully examined the suggestions of his
predecessors.

Of all the thinkers who had preceded him in the study of the
origin of species, Lamarck interested him the most. It tvas in Lyell’s
book on geology that Darwin came across Lamarck’s theory in great
detail; and it was there that Darwin first examined critically the
Frenchman’s idea that evolution was brought about through: (a)

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

the inheritance of acquired habits; (b) the use and disuse of organs;
and (c) the expression of the wants of animals. Unfortunately for
Lamarck, he gave out his doctrine of “habits-forming-new-organs”
as fact instead of opinion or hypothesis. “Nothing of all this should
be considered as an hypothesis or as a mere peculiar opinion; they
are, on the contrary, truths which require, in order to be made
evident, only attention to and observation of facts.” Had Lamarck
said something about natural selection as a factor in evolution,
Darwin would not have rejected the Frenchman’s ideas. But La-
marck missed the key of natural selection— completely! Repelled by
the Frenchman’s lack of adequate evidence, Darwin thrust aside
the Lamarckian theory as meager and inconclusive and full of
guesswork. “I have come not to care at all for beliefs without the
special facts. I have suffered too often from this.”

Returning to his own investigations he read book after book,
performed experiment upon experiment, plunged deeper and deeper
into the problem of artificial selection. He studied the doubtful
species which naturalists found difficult to classify, and thought
that tliese must be intermediate or transitional forms between two
different modifications of a parent form. One hypothesis after an-
other he tested after each ingeniously devised experiment. “I have
steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any
hypothesis however much beloved.”

In rejecting the doctrines of his predecessors, he slowly adopted
a definite point of view as to the nature of this mysterious phenom-
enon of variation. The facts that filled his notebooks and whirled
through his mind seemed to show that the means of modification
were a product of the animal or plant itself, not of its surround-
ings. In other words, the organism adapted itself to the environ-
ment; it was not the environment that worked its will upon the
organism. Certainly this was the case in artificial selection by breed-
ers; these men did not cause variations to appear. Nature herself
produced variations, yet man could (and did) select for his own
purposes the most favorable variations that occurred.

Darwin now felt certain that it was by some sort of selection that
modification of species took place. But how? Would he have to go
back to the scientifically groundless hypothesis of a beneficent

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227

Deity, a sort of Superbreeder improving the quality of his live-
stock? Or was there a natural agency which could adequately
explain the causation?

During this period of intense mental activity, while he was pre-
occupied with the search for the key to the problem that was haunt-
ing him, he picked up a book to divert his weary mind. It was
Malthus’ Essay on Population, and it set Darwin afire. Here was his
mechanism— the struggle for existence!

He knew that all animals varied from one another in greater or
less degree; he knew that some of these variations were favorable
and others not; he knew that artificial selection consciously chose
the most favorable for its purposes. How easy it was to see now
that this tremendous struggle for existence, which he knew from
his own first hand observation of nature, was a continuous, vital
phase of the organic world whereby only the fittest could survive!
The stark necessity to live selected the more favorable variations
in a state of nature, just as the desire for better stock determined
their selection under domestication. “It at once struck me that
under these circumstances favorable species would tend to be pre-
served, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed! The result of this
would be the formation of new species. Here then I had at last a
theory by which to work.”

How different everything appeared under this new light! He
thought: “We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we
often see superabundance of food, we do not see or we forget that
the birds which idly sing round us live mostly on insects or seeds,
are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely those
songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds
or beasts of prey; we do not always bear in mind that, though food
may be now superabundant, it is not so at all seasons of each
recurring year.” The struggle for existence penetrated every nook
and corner of nature: insects, fishes, birds, fruits, animals— all com-
peted bitterly with one another, fought for life, tried to survive in
a world of tooth-and-nail existence. And out of this struggle for
existence nature herself selected those whose organisms were better
adapted to survive.

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228

The role of the environment became clear now: varying environ-
ments did not produce varying modifications, but the modifications
were accumulated by natural selection to fit the varying environ-
ments. That is, a species dies because it is not adapted to changing
circumstances. A certain variety of ostrich, for example, may not
be well adapted to survive and hence will perish; but another
variety, being favorably adapted, will manage to live on and propa-
gate. Thus, variations, or departures from type are the raw mate-
rials of all progress. If this were not so all life would be static, fixed.

Species 'ivithout the capacity to vary swiftly enough were out-
stripped in the race for life. “Do or die” was the ultimatum of
natural selection: and Darwin found among his geological notes
scores of examples of varieties that had perished for want of varia-
bility. Obviously, a species that could vary itself had an advantage
in the struggle for existence over one that could not. This too
explains the likenesses and differences and the interrelationships
of animals. The origin of nexv species by slow processes of descent
with modifications from older species is evolution.

In addition to all this Darwin now began to understand more
closely the nature of interlocking adaptations to be foupd every-
where in the organic world. He saw how flowers secrete the honey
that bees use for their hives, and how the bees in return insure
the fertilization of the flowers by bearing pollen on their sticky legs
from one blossom to another.

"The web of life!”— the interlocking threads of adaptation, one
organism’s survival carrying with it the survival of another, the
vital interdependence of different parts of nature. Remove from
a certain environment a certain species of bird, and the insects it
feeds on will increase in tremendous numbers. By removing a single
plant or animal from an environment a readjustment takes place
all along the line; for nature is full of complex ties, balances and
checks.

: H

It was not only his theory that occupied his mind; much of his
time was devoted to the preparation and publication of monographs
growing out of his general interest in natural history and geology.
While he was investigating all these specialized subjects, the notes
bearing on his theory accuinulated and piled up. By the early sum-

DARWIN 229

mer of 1842 he felt the urge to put down on paper a short abstract
of the theory of natural selection. This outline written in pencil
covered thirty-five sheets; later in 1844 it was expanded to ttvo
hundred and thirty pages. Worried by incessant bad health, he
hastened to complete his expanded abstract; he placed it in a sealed
envelope, and entrusted it to his wife for publication in the event
of his death. He also suggested several editors for the work and
laid aside a sum of money to insure its publication. Had he died in
1844, the Origin of Species would not have been wnitten, for he
did not actually begin work 011 this major opus until 1854, after
the publication of an exhaustive monograph on the lowly species of
barnacles.

This work on the barnacles is significant in the history of his
theory, more so perhaps than any of his previous publications, for
in the careful study of these apparently insignificant little creatures
he acquired a thorough training in biology and a full realization
of the wisdom of a rigid control in his speculations. In a letter
written to his friend Joseph Hooker in 1849 he tells the effect of
this particular study on his theory. “I have been struck with the
variability of every part in some slight degree of every species.”

Nearly eight years were devoted to the examination of each
and every sort of variety and subvariety and minor and major
variation of function or structure that could possibly be located
within the limits of this single but numerous species. The results
of this cataloguing broadened the basis of his work; for he found
that each characteristic of the typical barnacle varied to such an
extent that there was between its extremes an extraordinarily large
number of gradations exhibiting numerous shadings.

At last, in 1854, he was able to write to his friend Joseph Hooker,
to whom he had confided the outlines of his theory, that his desk
was now clear of the barnacle job and he was ready to get to work
on his huge files of notes on the origin of species and varieties. To
his friend Lyell he made the same confidence; and these two— his
best friends— virtual leaders in their respective fields of botany and
geology awaited with impatient interest the outcome of his labors.

Lyell, oldest and most experienced of the three scientists, saw
the possibility of someone’s anticipating Darwin and urged him to
write his book as fast as possible. But Darwin could not hurry;

Sgo ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

he must patiently pursue every conceivable line of inquiry; he must
ferret out every fact bearing on his subject and accumulate his data
almost as slowly as the mechanism of natural selection had accumu-
lated variations to produce modifications. Nearly four years passed
and he apparently seemed no nearer to publication than at the out-
set of his inquiry. To be sure, he had his theory definitely built
with almost all the details filled in, but the fear of being premature
or of giving insufficient evidence for his arguments made him heed-
less of the necessity to hurry.

Horvever, something happened one day in June, 1858, which had
an effect on Darwin far greater than the advice of his closest friends.
On that memorable morning he received a letter from the other
end of the world an4 it proved to be the most important letter
ever mailed to him.

It was postmarked Ternate, an island in the Malay Archipelago.

On the thick envelope was marked the name of the sender— Alfred
Russel Wallace.

Darwin opened it. There was a letter and a manuscript. The title
of the manuscript interested him— On the Tendencies of Varieties
to Part Indefinitely from the Original Type.

Before thumbing the manuscript Darwin picked up the letter.
It asked him to read the accompanying sketch, and if he thought
well enough of it to pass it on to other naturalists— Lyell or Hooker
—with a view to publication in the near future. Darwin remembered
the last paper Wallace had written which Lyell had called to his
attention. That was three years ago. In it Wallace had discussed
modification of species as altogether probable, but he had not
touched on an explanation.

But this paper was different! Wallace too had read Malthus’ Essay
on Population. During a period of intermittent fever at Ternate he
was meditating on the problem of existence when the conclusion
arrived at by Malthus suddenly illuminated the riddle. In two days
he drafted a manuscript sketching a theory of adaptation through
the elimination of the unfit in the struggle for existence. It was this
manuscript that Darwin held in his hand.

When Darwin finished reading the Wallace sketch he was thun-

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231

derstruck. Nothing had ever affected him so forcibly; right before
his eyes was a statement of his own theory of natural selection
almost word for word! The ideas upon which he spent a lifetime
of labor were here set forth with amazing illumination.

What should he do about it?

Hurriedly he wrote a frantic letter to Lyell, put the case before
him, and asked his advice. “I would far rather burn my whole
book,” he wrote, “than that Wallace or any other man should think
that I behaved in a paltry spirit.” It seemed that his work was to
go for nought but to confirm Wallace’s theories— theories which
Wallace had formulated after investigations inspired by Darwin’s
own Journal of Researches. (Wallace was twenty-three years old
when he read Darwin’s Journal.) Unable to wait for a reply from
Lyell he also wrote to Hooker, repeating his willingness to resign
all credit to Wallace if it would aid the success of the idea.

But such a step was not necessary. At the suggestion of Lyell
and Hooker and with the willing consent of Wallace, a short
abstract of Darwin’s theory was read in conjunction with Wallace’s
paper at a meeting of the Linnaean Society on July 1, 1858. There
was added a letter Darwin had written in 1857 to Asa Gray, the
American botanist, giving in detail the theory of natural selection.

Thus the matter was amicably settled. And thus there was written
into the annals of mankind some of the most honorable pages in
the history of science.

But the theory born of endless research and carefully shielded
from possible disputes over priority seemed to be stillborn. True,
the meeting of the society at which it was read caught something
of its significance, for the discussion was intense and interested.
Unfortunately, Darwin could not be present. Illness prevented him
from attending, and Wallace was still in Malaysia. Had both men
been there, in all probability a strong public interest would have
been aroused; but beyond the rooms of the Linnaean Society no-
body was excited.

Perhaps that was a good thing. Inasmuch as the theory had been
placed before the leading body of English men of science, it was
now left to Darwin to assemble the book he had been working on
for these many years. “The one great result which I claim for my

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232

paper of 1858,” said Wallace, “is that it compelled Darwin to write
and publish his Origin of Species without further delay.”

Throughout all his researches Darwin had been in the habit of
methodically cataloguing and indexing not only his notes but also
all the books containing passages relating to the subject of the trans-
mutation of species. This habit proved fortunate for he was able
to handle his material with facility. Here was an opportunity to
review in a single sweep all the work of the past twenty years.

As he approached the end of the book, the potentialities of his
theory overxvhelmed him once more. What might not be discovered
by scientists concerning the natural world now that they had this
yardstick of natural selection to apply?

He tried hard to avoid a discussion of man as a product of the
same natural forces that operate through the principle of natural
selection. He realized that the origin of man was inextricably bound
up with that of the animal world— “our fellows in pain, disease,
suffering, famine and death— our slaves in the most laborious works,
our companions in our amusements.” He feared to do more than
suggest a common origin, since it was abundantly plain that people
were not prepared for any attempt to delve very far into the subject
of man. Apparently, too, many cherished sanctities were at stake.
For that reason Darwin restrained himself. Carefully choosing his
words, he wrote on the last page oFhis great manuscript: “Much
light will be throxvn on the origin of man and his history.” The
implication was obvious.

Finally he was ready for the press. Lyell suggested John Murray
of London as publisher. To him the manuscript was forwarded
and in the early part of November, 1859, the first edition of the
Origin of Species was presented to the world.

Darwin could hardly wait for the reviews and comments on his
book, so anxious was he to learn how the world was receiving his
theory. Reports were not slow in coming. The great naturalist had
underestimated the eager interest his doctrines would arouse.

Never had a scientific work created such general interest. The
first edition of more tlian a thousand copies was sold on the day
of publication; Darwin had to get immediately to work on a new

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233

one. People were asking for the book everywhere, actually bewilder-
ing the booksellers who never dreamed there would be such a
demand for a biological treatise.

Hooker was the first to announce his complete conversion. Lyell
hastened to inform him that he planned to include Darwin’s ideas
in a new book he was preparing on the antiquity of man. From far
and wide letters began to pour in. Besides Hooker and Lyell there
was one other scientist whose opinion Darwin eagerly sought— a
brilliant young zoologist, Thomas Huxley. Several days passed and
when no word had come from Huxley, Darwin became uneasy and
deeply pained. But in the meantime other letters flowed in: from
Carpenter the physiologist. Sir John Lubbock the zoologist, Jenyns
the paleontologist, H. C. Watson the botanist. All wrote to Damin
expressing their adherence to the new doctrine.

The clergy were not much slower than the scientists in learning
about evolution. As expected, they were vehemently against it,
rapidly forming an opposition headed by Samuel Wilberforce, the
Bishop of Oxford. Seeing that the theory of natural selection in-
validated the biblical account of creation, the clergy rightly sensed
a dangerous attack on the dogma of the fixity of species. For that
reason Darwin was loudly denounced; his work was called an
“utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation.” Lesser men than
Wilberforce asked Darwin how he dared to set up his doctrines
over the teaching of the Bible.

Not all the churchmen in those days were antagonistic. While
the vast majority were rabidly against Darwin, certain liberal theo-
logians were inclined to see in the new theory a greater revelation
of divinity. Charles Kingsley wrote to Darwin on November 18,
saying that what he had thus far seen of the book awed him. Much
that he had cherished would have to be swept away. But, he added,
“in that I care little. Let God be true, and every man a liar! Let us
know what is.”

Strained from all the labor and excitement of getting his book
ready for publication, Darwin decided to take a rest and accordingly
left home on November 23 to take the water cure at Ilkley. He was
sorry he had not heard from Huxley. But that very day Huxley,
having cleared his desk, from the mass of work upon it, wrote Dar-

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

234

win a note o£ sincere appreciation. The letter reached the theorist
at Ilkley.

No testimonial could have been more pleasing to the weary natu-
ralist than the hearty congratulations Huxley offered. With a few
reservations and corrections (which Darwin eagerly incorporated
into his theory) Huxley announced his wholehearted support.

He asked Darwin not to allow himself to become “disgusted or
annoyed by the considerable abuse and misrepresentation which,
unless I greatly mistake, is in store for you.” It was good advice
coming from a young man who declared he would take the field
in controversy to defend the theory against the “curs who would
bark and yelp” at it. “I am sharpening up my claws and beak in
readiness,” he wrote. Later he was to change the metaphor and
refer to himself as “Darwin’s bulldog.”

With the evolutionary controversy raging stronger every day each
side now had a leader: Huxley for Darwin, and Wilberforce for
the clergy. In the churches throughout the land sermons were
preached against the new monster and his associates. Darwin was
denounced from pulpit to pulpit as an anti-Christ, a God-smasher,
an enemy of the people.

It was to be expected that so revolutionary an idea would meet
with emphatic public disfavor. It has always been the customary fate
of new doctrines to be misunderstood and misapplied. One of the
most prevalent of the misconceptions disseminated by the anti-
Darwinians was that which misinterpreted the doctrine of evo-
lution to imply that men are descended from monkeys. It is
astounding how widespread this error is even today.

Darwin, to be sure, had avoided developing the application of his
theory to man, but this policy turned out to be an error in judg-
ment; for the public, lacking any studied investigation of this point,
drew its own erroneous conclusion, namely, that man was descended
from the monkeys. But evolution taught, not that men had monkeys
for their ancestors, but that both men and the monkeys had a com-
mon origin in the remote depths of time and that both had branched
out from a common progenitor of the prehistoric past. From this
ancestor, who had been neither man nor ape, man had descended
along one line of development and the monkeys along another.
At no time did Darwin say that humans are descended from any

DARWIN 235

of the various ape types. His claim was that apes are distant cousins
—that is, allied to man— rather than ancestors of humanity.

Once having misunderstood the matter, the public was in no
mood to change its views. The battle was now carried to the news-
papers and magazines over the country. Most of the reviews were
definitely against the new doctrine, although no clear or cogent
argument was advanced by the opponents. For Darwin, by his care-
ful and detailed elucidation of every possible objection to his theory,
had forestalled his enemies. Every argument against his doctrine
had been given in the Origin of Species so clearly and completely
that there was little that his critical enemies could add. Neverthe-
less Darwin knew only too well that his work was in for a long
campaign of misunderstanding and vilification. The Athenaeum led
off with an anonymous review that ridiculed what it called the
author’s “evident self-satisfaction” and his airy manner of disposing
of all difficulties. Other reviews accused Darwin of having made “an
insane attempt to dethrone God”; he was called “an inhaler of
mephitic gas”; his argument was a “jungle of fanciful assumption.”
Such was the tenor of the opposition that it carried little weight
with those men of science who knew Darwin to be a painstaking,
careful investigator and anything but cocksure.

It was difficult to get a correct exposition of the Darwunian point
of view into any of the older papers, which were naturally conserva-
tive. A great coup however was scored by Huxley when he managed
to obtain the assignment to review the book in The Times. The
regular reviewer, Lucas, had been at a loss to know what to do with
the Origin of Species, scientific books being out of his line. A friend
suggested he ask Huxley to review it. Huxley did, giving a careful
and lucid presentation of the theory. The review appeared anony-
mously in The Times of December 26. Lucas had made the formal
gesture of writing a few introductory paragraphs; but the body of
the long and xvidely read review was Huxley’s (although this was not
generally known).

Everybody was now talking about the theory of evolution, re-
viling Darwin for the most part. And yet, such was the intellectual
climate of the age, one seemed to sense in the very air of the con-
troversy the essential truth of the new teaching and the inevitability
of its success.

236 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

While his friends were fighting for the new gospel, Darwin, pre-
vented both by health and his naturally gentle disposition from
active participation in the battles, went back to work. He gathered
his notes on artificial selection into a book on Variation under
Domestication whose publication added still more evidence to that
of the Origin.

The Origin itself took a great deal of his time. As the editions
mounted and suggestions and corrections continued to come in
from naturalists all over the world, Darwin was supremely happy.
Nothing was more characteristic of the man than his sincere humil-
ity which was based on the vast and haunting sense of his own
ignorance. Anyone interested in learning the extent of Darwin’s
open-mindedness should compare the first and last editions of the
Origin, and remember that nearly all the sweeping changes he will
find are the direct or indirect result of outside information and
advice offered to the writer.

While Huxley led the actual battle, Darwin himself won many
converts. His reputation for accuracy, for scientific completeness,
for generous and honest tolerance was gradually acknowledged
even by his opponents. The stories of his kindliness and gentle char-
acter made a deep impression on those ordinary everyday citizens
who were inclined at first to accept the verdict of their clergymen
and condemn him as Satan’s representative on earth.

Meanwhile his work advanced and with it the recognition of his
theory. As early as 1863 the Reverend Charles Kingsley wrote to a
friend abroad; “The state of the scientific mind is most curious;
Darwin is conquering everywhere, and rushing in like a flood by
the mere force of truth and fact.” The flood had progressed so far
that in i8yi Huxley was able to point to a complete revolution in
biological science produced by the Origin and to compare it with
a somewhat similar revolution produced in astronomy by Isaac New-
ton’s Principia. This totally altered aspect of biology was of course
due to Darwin’s totally new point of view; and the research that
was now being projected had a totally new and much more fruitful
means of approach.

The stage in which Darwin found biology is comparable to the

DARWIN

237

Ptolemaic era in astronomy. The Origin of Species changed things
completely. No such great body of evidence had ever been brought
together before. Almost overnight the scientists who had been col-
lecting and studying various species abandoned the old biblical
doctrine and started to think anew in Darwinian terms of varia-
tion. There were, in Copernicus’ day, many difficulties in the way
of believing that the earth moved. So, too, in Darwin’s day there
were many obstacles to overcome before men could renounce the
dogma of special creation. Most people were not prepared to think
in transformation terms.

So profound and Jar-reaching was this new way of looking at
nature that its influence was beginning to be felt far beyond the
realms of biology. Progress in all branches of human learning was
now accelerated. All the sciences were brought closer together, their
interlocking relations being shown much more clearly under the
light of evolution.

The theory of natural selection, besides placing upon its feet
the mass of evidence for evolution, suddenly gave tremendous
impetus to the search for new evidence. Men investigated geologic
strata, established the immense age of the earth, and were able to
ascertain at the same time the approximate age of the various fossils
uncovered in these strata. The study of these fossils and the knowl-
edge of their antiquity shed a bright light upon the meaning of
evolution, for in these imperishable records of the past it was
possible to trace the successive species of animal and vegetable life
from the first lowly forms to the highly developed types of the
present time. The quest for intermediate forms— the missing links—
in the evolutionary tree became intensified, and before Darwin’s
death many such specimens were discovered. In 1880 the American
O. C. Marsh bridged the gap between reptiles and birds by the
discovery in North America of a large deposit of fossil-toothed birds,
an indisputable link. Very significant discoveries were those frag-
ments of early man which have been found in Java (1894); in
Belgium (1886); in south Germany (1907); in England (1912). All
these specimens were not identical, but represented varying degrees
of advancement along the trail to modern man. The finds in each
case were fragmentary, consisting often of no more than a portion
of a jawbone, a few teeth, a part of a thigb. But so remarkable is

ggS ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

the science of comparative anatomy that from these fragments the
entire skeletons of our remote ancestors have been reconstructed.
Thus man’s antiquity has come to be measured not in centuries
but in millions of years.

Not content to rest on his laurels after the publication of th^
Origin of Species and the collection of his notes on domestic varia-
tion, Darwin continued working up to the day of his death— still
under the same conditions of poor health. One of the chief diffi-
culties in his theory— the explanation of apparently useless parts
of flowers— he met and solved by a monumental work on orchids,
in which he was able to show that each ridge and projection in their
elaborate blossoms had its own function in the struggle for
existence.

In February, 1867, he had an interval of spare time. Anxious to
write about the application of natural selection to man he began
a “chapter,” but soon found it growing. After several interruptions
he sat down to continuous work and in 1871 there appeared The
Descent of Man. The publication was Darwin’s answer to those
who had long taunted him with being afraid to apply the same
natural laws to man’s origin as he had applied to the origin of
species. The Descent of Man aroused a tremendous interest through-
out the world: it dispelled the fond dreams of sentimental idealists
who had hoped that the belief in man’s separateness and special
creation might be preserved. In the closing words of this book
Darwin said:

“We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man
with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most
debased, with benevolence, which extends not only to other men
but to the humblest living creature, with his Godlike intellect,
which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the
solar system— with all these exalted powers— man still bears in his
bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”

The uncertainties of humanity’s pedigree and antiquity are still
great, but it is not to be denied that the mass of evidence brought
to light since Darwin wrote The Descent of Man sufficiently proves
. that man and ape are divergent offshoots of a common stock.

DARWIN

239

Each year Darwin came more and more to be consulted as a court
of last resort in all matters of natural history. Young scientists sent
their books to him for criticism; the mail from his readers assumed
stupendous proportions.

Slowly the die-hard conservatives of the scientific world, realiz-
ing his importance, began to change their attitude toward the man
and his theory. A growing crop of medals, honors, appointments,
honorary degrees and other emoluments poured in upon Darwin
as the years passed. As early as May, i860, he had been elected a
corresponding member of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences. In
1864, to the horror of his enemies, he was awarded the Copley
Medal of the Royal Society, the highest honor any scientist in Eng-
land could attain. True, it was expressly stipulated that the award
was for Darwin’s work in geology, zoology and botany (the Origin
of Species was only incidentally praised for the “mass of observa-
tions’’ it contained), but the recognition, however shamefaced, was
there.

His honorary LL.D. degree from Cambridge broke that univer-
sity’s rule of never awarding honorary degrees to its own graduates.
Other awards and honorary elections came to him from abroad,
from Prussia, France, Italy and Holland. The Emperor of Brazil
expressed a desire to meet him. Apparently everyone was now turn-
ing to him, praising the name of the man who a few years before
had been reviled as an atheist and a degenerate.

Darwin took little notice of these honors other than to acknowl-
edge them with a courteous expression of gratitude. He continued
his researches, publishing a huge volume on earthworms in 1877.
But now his research was more handicapped than ever by his mal-
ady; the constantly recurring attacks of nausea cut short his working
periods; more and more frequent trips to the water resorts had
to be made. But he never thought of easing his labors or abating
a jot of the apparently endless energy that had carried him so far.
In one of his works he casually mentions having counted under
a microscope over twenty thousand seeds of a certain plant!

Toward the summer of i88i the burden of his malady grew
heavier; he felt he had not much longer to go. With his instinct ,

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

240

for thoroughness he did not undertake any new line of research,
fearing lest he might leave it unfinished. He grew weak and tired
as the end of the year approached.

In December heart attacks began. The first came when he had
gone to London. He was suddenly stricken on the steps of George
Romanes’ house. The butler saw his condition and wanted him
to come in and rest; but Darwin, to the last unwilling to discom-
mode anyone, protested weakly that he could manage by himself.
The butler saw him totter down the street and get into a cab.

The attacks became more frequent in February. On April 15,
1882, he was seized while at dinner and was confined to his bed
the next day. He got up toward afternoon and made some notes
on the progress of an experiment. But this little effort seemed to
have exhausted him again, for at midnight a severe attack gripped
him and he realized he was close to the end. “I am not the least
afraid to die,” he whispered to his family gathered about his bed.

Next morning weariness crept over him and life slowly ebbed
away. Soon he sank into unconsciousness and at four in the after-
noon he died.

His family wanted him to be buried at Down where he had
lived; but the pressure of public and scientific opinion caused the
interment to be in Westminster Abbey. It was there, in the presence
of representatives of the scientific societies of all the world, that
Charles Darwin was laid to rest next to Sir Isaac Newton.

10. Marx THEORY OF THE

ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY

BEFORE the advent of Darwin all biology was in a stage compara-
ble to astronomy before Copernicus. What Darwin and Copernicus
did for their respective sciences Karl Marx accomplished in the
domain of history. Few theorists have possessed so colossal a mind,
especially in its ability to absorb the thinking of men of diverse
nationalities.

Just as Darwin had his predecessors, so too had Marx; and just
as Darwin was profoundly influenced by Malthus so Marx was in-
fluenced by Hegel.

It is therefore to Hegel— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel— that
we must first turn in order to understand how Karl Marx arrived
at his theory of the economic interpretation of history.

In the autumn of 1836, four years after the death of Hegel, Karl
Marx came to the University of Berlin to study history and law.
The figure of Professor Hegel was still considered the brightest
star in all intellectual Europe. He had had the rare honor of being
elevated within his own lifetime to the post of official philosopher
of Germany. From far and wide students had flocked to his lectures,
for it was conceded that he ruled the philosophic world as indis-
putably as Goethe dominated the world of literature and Beethoven
the world of music.

Hegel was unquestionably the voice of the age. Not that he had
expressed its spirit of revolutionary struggle and change (he was
at heart too much of a conservative to do that), but he had given
to his students and his readers a formula which he called a “dialec-
tic” whereby all the many positive and negative aspects of history,
ethics, law, politics and biology could be understood.

By dialectic Hegel meant a process of thinking which would give

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

242

a complete insight into the dramatic conflict of ideas, institutions,
and societies. Through it one could see with amazing clarity that
a great harmonizing principle (synthesis) was also at work in nature
and history, forever bringing unity out of the conflict. Dialectic,
therefore, soon became the name of the process by which ail things
grow, change, and redevelop.

Consider an egg. It is something positive, but it contains within
itself a germ which gradually changes the contents. This change
(negation) is not destruction or annihilation: it results in a living
thing. Thus Hegel taught that all things are not static but transi-
tional. One sex is the antithesis of the other, yet out of the anti-
thetical relationship there emerges the living individual. Hegel
insisted that we must think dialectically because the facts which we
think about develop dialectically. In this process every movement
produces, by an automatic reaction, its opposite; and of the result-
ing conflict between opposites, between thesis and antithesis, is born
the final synthesis.

Hegel’s dialectic made a profound impression. Everywhere men
were eager for just such an understanding. In an age of change it
is marvelous to grasp large certainties. It was an era of movement,
an age that had seen old states die and attempts made at the forma-
tion of new ones. The Industrial Revolution, which was to doom all
previously existing forms of economic relations, had already be-
gun its inevitable process. A static world had rapidly become a
dynamic one.

Into this tumultuous age there had shot the mind of Hegel— a
man with a formula. He saw all life as a process of change, of com-
bination, of struggle and development. Because he was a philoso-
pher, Hegel attempted to grasp history in an all-embracing system
of logic. His attempt was a brilliant and profound intellectual feat
which influenced a whole generation, including the mind of a young
student who was to become not only a great theorist but also a
great and original economist.

Hegel wrote many books and they are all difficult to read because
his ideas are couched in language that is often obscure. It has long
been claimed that when a man talks about what he does not under-

MARX

stand to a lot of people who do not understand him he is talking
“metaphysics.” Such a charge, especially in Hegel’s case, states a
certain truth which is borne out in the story told about a French-
man who asked Hegel to put his philosophy into one sentence.
Hegel said he preferred to answer in ten volumes. When the vol-
umes were published and all the world was talking about them,
Hegel complained that “only one man understands me, and at times
even he does not.”

The most suggestive thing Hegel did was to explain the mean-
ing of “relation.” Hegel showed that everything in the universe is
related or dependent; he showed that we cannot intelligently discuss
anything except by reference to something other than that which
we talk of. For example, we cannot talk about the floor without
implying the walls, any more than we can talk about fish without
implying water; nor can we talk about the sky without implying the
earth. Likeness has no meaning apart from difference. The universe
is a systematic whole of inteiTelated qualities (positive and nega-
tive). Every actual thing involves a coexistence of contrary elements.
Consequently to know (or comprehend) anything is equivalent to
being conscious of it as a unified group of contrarieties. The truth
about any thing or any idea involves the truth of contrast and oppo-
sition. Thus that which existed a moment ago (thesis) contained its
opposition (antithesis), and has now resulted in a compromise or
union (synthesis).

Here then is the famous Hegelian formula that impressed itself
so indelibly on the mind of Marx— thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
All the wide reading he had done suddenly took on meaning. His-
tory was no longer a tranquil growth but a working through oppo-
sition— a triadic movement which is the law of all development.
History was no longer a mass of happenings but a unity emerging
amidst opposing diversities. So profoundly had Marx been in-
fluenced by this dialectical way of looking at things that his son-in-
law Lafargue once remarked that “he never saw a thing-by-itself,
out of touch with its setting; but contemplated it as a part of a
complicated and mobile world of things. His aim was to expand all
the life of this world of things in its manifold and incessantly vary-
ing action and reaction-.”

244

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Granted that all life and all history are shot through and through
with this threefold movement of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, the
question that arises is: What causes this movement?

Hegel answered by saying that it is the work of the Absolute—
that is, God or Mind or Cosmic Spirit— which is marching on
through time. The march of the absolute is, at bottom, a spiritual
process that ceaselessly realizes itself in successive steps from the
lowest forms to the highest. To Hegel, God was the absolute mind,
for whom the whole organized system of things exists. God is the
unitary spirit, and the whole creation lives in His own concrete
differences of nature, of men and of things. .

Hegel spoke and wrote a great deal about the absolute in lan-
guage eminently inhuman. Essentially he was a philosopher and
philosophers very often mix wisdom with obscurantism, so that side
by side with their flashes of illumination there are to be found all
; too frequently the dark aspects of things incomprehensible. So it

i ■ was with Hegel. For that reason young Marx did not hesitate to

j , take from Hegel what he thought important and discard the
irrelevant. «

The Hegelian dialectic is what Marx considered important; the
Hegelian absolute is what he considered irrelevant. When Marx
came to answer the question: What causes the triadic movement?
he bluntly stated it wasn’t the absolute— far from it! Economic
causes, not the march of the absolute, said Marx, account for the
movements of history. Marx discovered that the economic factor
is the fundamental factor in human history. He did not say, as
many people erroneously believe, that it is the only factor. Because
the Marxian theory maintains that economic forces are pri mar y, it
is frequently called “the materialistic interpretation of history.”

But it would be a grave mistake to say that the Marxian theory
is materialistic in the sense in which people ordinarily use that
word. It is true, on the one hand, that Marx rejected Hegel’s abso-
lute; but it is also true (arid this is what many wholly forget or
ignore) that Marx also rejected the passive materialism of Feuer-
^ bach and the “vulgar” materialism of Buchner, Vogt and Mole-

MARX

: /2 4 5

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) was a German philosopher who
also greatly influenced Karl Marx. Like Marx, Feuerbach accepted
the Hegelian dialectic (thesis, antithesis and synthesis); also like
Marx, Feuerbach rejected Hegel’s idea of the march of the absolute.
Feuerbach was an out and out materialist. Whereas Hegel made the
universe arise out of pure reason, out of the logical absolute idea,
developing through the dialectical process, Feuerbach claimed that
nature (not God) comes first, and nature is at bottom matter. Feuer-
bach argued that God did not make man, but that man made God,
and that man fundamentally is nothing more than the product of
the mechanical forces of nature. Instead of seeing in the Hegelian
dialectic the march of the absolute, Feuerbach saw nothing else but
the march of material forces.

Feuerbach’s materialism was of the most mechanical kind in
which man came to be regarded as nothing more than a machine—
a creature of his own appetite. So thoroughgoing was the material-
ism of Feuerbach with its denial of the role of mind, that his
statement Der Mensch ist was er isst (man is what he eats) summed
up in one sentence the nature of this mechanical generalization.

But to Marx man was more than a machine. To explain the
whole of society on the basis of "man is what he eats” is contrary to
facts, for man is in possession of consciousness and his conscious-
ness is determined by a highly complex set of historico-economic
situations. To claim that man is the result solely of environment
overlooks the fact that environment itself can be changed by man.
“The materialistic doctrine,” Marx said in one of his critical notes
on Feuerbach, “that men are products of conditions and education,
different men therefore products of other conditions, and a dif-
ferent kind of education, forgets that circumstances may be altered
by man and that the educator has himself to be educated.”

LFnfortunately for Hegel he was intoxicated with philosophical
idealism; unfortunately for Feuerbach he was intoxicated with
philosophical materialism. Marx early in his career grasped the
inconsistency, the incompleteness and the lopsidedness of both. It
seemed to him that Feuerbach’s attempt to take Hegel’s absolute
idea and relabel it “matter” solved nothing. Both views contained
a blunt disregard of economic and industrial facts. Both views were

,| 246 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

I far more inaccurate than the followers of Hegel and Feuerbach

; ' were prepared to realize.

1 ' 5

; Certainly man is more than a machine. Marx knew it— he was

i in love! He was secretly engaged to Jenny, the daughter of Baron

j' -; von Westphalen. His first year at the University of Berlin did not

J give him much happiness, for he was tossed about by spiritual and

j, mental unrest. Not only was he far away from his beloved Jenny,

I but in those formative years Marx was also a poet sensitive to all

; j. the delicate nuances of beauty and romance. To those who are ac-

'I, ' quainted with the seemingly sober and unemotional pattern of his

i ! later career it may strike a somewhat strange note to recall that

I ■ the first published work of the author of the theory of the economic

1 interpretation of history was a lyric poeml “Everything was centered

i on poetry,” he said of his early student days in Berlin, “as if I

were bewitched by some unearthly power.” Romantic rather than
classical literature made the strongest appeal to him at this particu-
lar time, when he was working night and day studying philosophy,
jurisprudence, history, geography and countless other things.

Against the wishes of her family and friends Marx claimed Jenny.
Not all the study, discussion and intellectual adventure of these
student days could reduce or minimize his romantic attachment.
Under duress the engagement was temporarily broken. Relatives
of the Westphalen family did not like the idea of a Prussian noble-
man’s daughter marrying a Jew. Even though Karl Marx had been
baptized when he was only six years old, still it was remembered
that practically every one of Marx’s male forebears, both on his
father’s and mother’s side, had been rabbis.

In 1841 young Marx received his degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Together with an instructor and friend, Bruno Bauer, he sought
a position as lecturer at the University of Bonn. But he did not
get the appointment. He was about to marry Jenny when the lec-
tureship was refused him, and he suddenly realized that he had
yet to find a career. Here the forces of economic necessity played
their part in directing the young man’s destiny to its goal. He
turned to journalism for his livelihood, joining the staff of the
^ ; Zeitung, a radical paper published in Cologne. But the

■ pS'Per did not last ve^ry long. Early in 1843 the government sup-

MARX

247

pressed it. Nevertheless Marx was, in love—and that the govern-
ment could not suppress. , So in the summer of this year he married
Jenny and a few months later moved to Paris.

Long before he came to Paris he had felt the great need of know-
ing more about French political and economic thought. Not that
French thinking was anything new to him, but there was always
in' him the restless quest for more accurate knowledge and a deeper
understanding.

From his early childhood years Marx had been familiar with
French ways, for he was brought up in close sympathy with his
fathers , ideas (Marx’s father was a lawyer and a disciple of the
eighteenth . century philosophers). In a study of the theory of eco-
nomic interpretation no one ought ever to underestimate the pow-
erful influence , of the French materialistic philosophers upon Marx
—men like Diderot, Helvetius, d’Alembert, Holbach. These men
were the forerunners of the French Revolution, ruthless critics of
church and state. Moreover, they always looked to the material
facts, not to metaphysical abstractions, for the explanation of the
nature of man and of society.

Already in his youth Marx had felt this powerful intellectual
current. As a child he was familiar with Diderot and Voltaire, And
now that he was gxown up and actually living on French soil, he
felt within himself something strangely akin to those august think-
ers who were unwilling to believe anything on authority. From them
he learned how to investigate facts with patience, how to insist on
the value of positive knowledge, and how to attain to a compre-
hensiveness which would confer upon him the power of generaliza-
tion. Like these men young Marx began to exhibit an encyclopedic
learning: a mind like a vast ocean lapping many shores.

Marx was now twenty-five years old. When he arrived in the
French capital with his bride, the socialist movement was at its
zenith. But the socialism of that day was not the socialism of Marx.
So great has been the impression left by Marx upon socialist thought
that one hardly ever hears about the socialism of Owen, Saint-Simon
and Fourier, whose theories he wiped out by his projection of the
economic interpretation of history.

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

248

No man in the world had studied with such avidity the works
of the French socialists as Karl Marx. For that reason no one was
better prepared to analyze them and point out their defects. The
fundamental fault in all the socialists he had read was their un-
scientific approach. Instead of attempting to seek out the origins
and sources of capitalism and in this way come to realize the
essential nature of the system they were fighting, they wasted their
time and that of their readers in painting fanciful utopias where
all the difficulties of capitalism would be eliminated by a beneficent
government of workers. The fallacy of utopianism was easily
grasped by Marx. What these socialists needed was a sound appre-
ciation of the economig realities underlying human existence. What
was to be done was also clear to Marx: to discard uto.pias and to
apply the vigor of dialectical analysis of past history to present
politics as well as to future societies. It was useless to play with hopes
and fears and ideas. There was the stern reality of economic law
to be faced.

In Paris he associated with both German and French writers.
There was the poet Heinrich Heine, the publicist Arnold Ruge, the
socialist Pierre Joseph Proudhon. He was intimate with them all.
Heine’s poetry made an especial appeal to Marx. Long years after
the poet’s death when Marx was living in exile in London, he loved
to quote the incorrigible nonconformist Heine, “that queer fowl,
a poet,” as Marx once put it.

Marx in Paris was a busy young man reading, studying, meeting
people. The summer and autumn of 1843 were given over to
intensive intellectual work. He reread the histories of France, Ger-
many and the United States, seeking for those economic factors that
would bear out his own interpretation of history. The writings of
Machiavelli, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Ricardo were likewise
given the keenest kind of sifting and analysis. Out of all this vast
reading there developed in his mind additionally strong confirma-
tion of his early views touching the relation of history to economics.

History, Marx came to believe, must be scientifically studied
without resort to mystical conceptions such as Hegel’s absolute idea.
To separate history from natural science and industry was like
separating the soul from the body and “finding the birthplace of

history, not in the gross material production of earth, but in the
misty cloud formation of heaven.”

Thus it was abundantly plain to him that economic phenomena
determine all other historical facts and make it possible to explain
the vast complex of human affairs. In this matter it is clear that
absolute and irrefutable proof is hardly possible. In the physical
sciences a great many phenomena repeat themselves, with a suffi-
cient uniformity as to details and time intervals to be stated, for
practical purposes, in the form of “laws.” In the social sciences,
at best only a high degree of probability seems attainable. There-
fore that theory works best which explains most satisfactorily the
body of facts under examination, so that the high degree of proba-
bility is secured by the convergence toward one conclusion of a
number of facts so great that any other explanation becomes
absurd.

Taking certain ideas of Hegel as a point of departure, Marx was
able to demonstrate the whole nexus of relations that exists be-
tween the superstructure of society and its material basis. He
unraveled the connection between economics and politics, between
economics and culture, between economics and the course of his-
tory. For the first time history was set up on its real foundation,
not as a narrative of war and peace, of royal genealogies, of unre-
lated dates, but as a record of man’s vital existence through the
ages. Instead of being a romantic tale it now became the study
of the great mass of mankind, how it lived and struggled and moved
forward.

The lamentable disregard for the economic aspects which char-
acterized the thinking of the philosophers and historians of the
past was completely checked by Marx. With profound insight and
determined scholarship he marshaled his arguments in such a way
that he was able to construct a moving dynamic theory of history.
Moreover, by that theory he was able to point out how one stage
of society gretv into another in a steady transition. The new society
did not wait impatiently off stage while the old took its final bows.
It grew up within the old, and when it had attained full maturity,
the shell of outmoded laws, political institutions and culture fell
from it.

The more Marx delved into history the more he realized the

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250

importance of economic production. Production determined the
spirit of whatever age he studied. The social, political, religious
and intellectual life of a people is built upon it and around it.
Because it is the basic element in the struggle for existence, it
conditions and develops the consciousness of men. Marx set the
horse before the cart for the first time with his statement: “It is
not the consciousness of mankind that determines its existence, but
on the contrary its social existence determines its consciousness.”

This was the keynote, sounded now for the first time, of the
theory of economic interpretation of history. Before we proceed
further with Marx and see how he elaborated his conception, it
is worthwhile to consider previous theories of history, to see just
how weighty was the tradition that this obscure German journalist,
unaware where he would get enough money to support himself
and his wife through the winter, now set out to overturn.

As long as language has existed men have employed it to record
their doings. But history is more than the sum total of all of man’s
records about himself. It is a phase of the universal process in which
he lives and of which he is. To compile records and collect data is
not sufficient; the records and the data stand in need of interpre-
tation. History, therefore, is more than the record of history, more
than the narrative of surface events.

The ancient Greeks were the initiators of genuine historical
writing. Herodotus, the father of history, is still an important source
book. Now Herodotus of course is full of fairy tales, but he is also
full of vivid descriptions of the life and times in which he wrote.
Interpretation, however, except in the shallow sense of seeking to
glorify Athenian democracy, was lacking.

With Thucydides a canon of historical criticism was established:
first, that it must be accurate; second, that it must be relevant to
the main stream of events; third, that what we know of the past
“will be useful, because, according to human probability, similar
things will happen again.” Polybius, perhaps a better historian in
the modem sense than either Herodotus or Thucydides, established
a method of scientific history, in which he insisted upon a knowl-
edge of geography and topography, and a philosophical attitude.

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251

All these Greek writers, and the Romans who followed them,
failed to understand the underlying economic and social causes
of historical events and movements. Polybius in his limited way
perceived an impersonal, latent basis, but it seemed to him ethical
rather than economic, while both Thucydides and Herodotus em-
phasized the influence of personalities and dramatic effects.

With the fall of the Roman Empire and the growth of Chris-
tianity as the principal power of Western civilization, history soon
lost even the meager scientific basis it possessed, as the Fathers of
the Church proceeded to convert it to their own theological pur-
poses. The first of their desires was to establish a reputable past
for Christianity: to do this it was necessary to take certain aspects
of Jewish history, hitherto assigned to an insignificant position in
historical writing, and elevate them to the rank of the major move-
ment in civilization, finally fulfilling its destiny in producing the
Church. Then they laid hold of the miracles and legends surround-
ing the personality of Jesus, his disciples and the saints, and wove
them into a mighty transcendental drama. In doing this they had
to minimize and discredit all pagan history. Accordingly they
painted all non-Christian history as a horrible . nightmare of war,
pestilence, crime, misery and godlessness. St. Augustine for example
saw only two kingdoms on earth: the kingdom of Satan and the
kingdom of God. Everything pertaining to the Church was of God
and therefore good, whereas all else was of Satan and consequently
wicked.

This theological interpretation, with its idea of divine interposi-
tion and direction through miracles, was a consistent attempt to
give coherency to the stream of events. As such it made a powerful
appeal to the medieval mind. For fifteen hundred years it remained
the supreme and “revealed” interpretation of history.

With the dawn of the Renaissance and the Humanist movements
in the arts and sciences, this theological manner of viewing history
could not long continue. Even in the medieval period just before
the Renaissance there were historians who sought to get back to
the calm and careful amassing of data that had been tire custom
before the Church Fathers began to write their manuscripts. Most
notable of these was Otto Freising, who wrote world history with
less of a supernatural bias, although there was not yet that recog-

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

252

nition of underlying causes which the more advanced Greek and
Roman writers had attained. Beside Freising, there was the Arab
Ibn Khaldun, who was one of the first to insist upon a development
in history and to conceive of it as a process of origin and growth.

With the coming of the modern era men like Flavius Blondus,
Machiavelli, Guicciardini discarded the Church’s clumsy attempts
and proceeded to pick up the thread where the Greeks and Romans
had been cut off. With Machiavelli a particularly new and impor-
tant addition was made: the recognition of cause and effect in the
political evolution of the city of Florence. Unfortunately, the value
of this point of view was not immediately perceived. The idea of
causation in the study of history was too far removed from the rut
created by the medieval Church. Slowly and by very gradual de-
grees, however, it began making some headw'ay. Voltaire, Vico,
Turgot, Condorcet and others were able to emancipate themselves
from theological restrictions. In his Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire
sought to describe the totality of French civilization in terms of
the “folk-soul” or the “genius of a people,” which he considered
the main determining factor in history. Vico, the Italian, wrote in
terms of a theory of cycles. Turgot and Condorcet laid stress on
the principles of continuity and causality.

Brilliant and courageous as were these newer writings, they still
missed the main point; none had yet got to the fundamentals of
historical causes. In Montesquieu we find an advance over all prede-
cessors. This Frenchman sought to analyze Voltaire’s “spirit of a
people” in terms of topography, geography, climate. He insisted that
the institutions of a society were worthwhile only insofar as they
were adapted to the spirit of that society. This point of view was
a tremendous leap forward and gave ample promise for the future.
(It must always be borne in mind that Marx was saturated with the
French philosophers and that the indistinct glimmerings of their
thought reached its effulgence through him.)

With the nineteenth century began the creation of the philo-
sophical superstructure that was to reach its peak in Hegel. The
principal exponents of this philosophical idealism applied to history
the Hegelian Weltgeist (World Spirit), which to them culminated
in German ifuftwr. : History to Hegel was (as we have already seen)
a dialectical movement full of wide swings now to the right and now

MARX

253

to the left, in which people are little more than instruments in the
hands of God, the Absolute, expressing itself through the Zeitgeist,
the Spirit of the Age.

Quite different from this point of view is the conception of his-
tory found in the writings of Michelet, Froude, and Thomas Carlyle
—all contemporaries of Marx. In the works of these men there is
not only a profound contempt for the economic basis of daily life,
but an insistence on the role of the hero, the great man, the indi-
vidual leader, the striking personality. In this highly subjective view
of history, with its unconcern with other than the immediate en-
vironment, we can see clearly the background of the opposing his-
torical schools against which Marx hurled his challenge— the eco-
nomic interpretation of history. No historian but Marx could have
written in that day that “in changing the modes of production
mankind changes all its social relations, the hand mill creates a
society with the feudal lord, a steam mill a society with the indus-
trial capitalist.” Why? Because Karl Marx was the first to grasp the
essential difference between the “techniques” of production and the
“modes” of production. By techniques he meant the inventions, the
machines, the skills, the organization of factories whereby men pro-
duce the goods they need. By modes he meant the social and prop-
erty relations which determine the ownership and control of these
means as well as their distribution. When the techniques of pro-
duction undergo great development, the older social and property
relations frequently become inadequate and act more and more as
a barrier to the continuing progress of society. This lag creates an
intolerable situation. To permit the techniques (the means) of pro-
duction to develop further, and thereby to serve more adequately
the needs of man, it becomes necessary to overthrow the older social
and property relations and establish new ones. This is what Marx
meant by a revolution.

Thus the clash between the techniques of production and the
modes of production is the fundamental fact that Marx demon-
strated to historians who had been ignoring it for centuries.

Marx was in Paris only a short while when he undertook, jointly
with Arnold Ruge, the publication of a periodical called the

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

254

Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbucher (Franco-German Yearbooks). Un-
fortunately the adventure began and ended with the first number.
It was not long after this that Marx and Ruge became intellectually
estranged. In August, 1844, under the title Marginal Notes, Maxx

published in a Paris magazine a lengthy polemic against Ruge,

defending socialism and revolution and taking the part of the Ger-
man proletariat.

Unlike Darwin, Marx was a fighter— a thinker and a fighter rolled
into one. “Before all else, Marx was a revolutionist,” declared

Friedrich Engels, when he spoke the last words that closed the

theorist’s career at Highgate Cemetery in London. “Few men ever
fought with so much passion.” These words that Engels uttered so
touchingly in 1883 were true of Marx in September, 1844, when
Engels came to Paris to join hands and heart with Karl and Jenny.

Fortunately for Marx there was Engels. Never did a theorist
need a friend and helper more. To be sure, they had a great deal
in common. Both men were born in the Rhine province of Prussia
—Marx at Treves in 1818, Engels at Barmen in 1820. For centuries
this district had witnessed the intermingling of the forces of French
and German civilization: here they fought and trafficked, producing
a blended culture of a rich and active type.

Marx and Engels first met in Cologne in 1842. It was a brief meet-
ing for Engels was on his way to England to represent his father’s
business. The firm owned a cotton mill near Manchester.

In 1844 Engels came to Paris to see Marx with the very definite
purpose of aligning himself with the economic theorist. Engels had
already contributed an article to the first and only issue of the
Deutsch-Franzdsische Jahrbucher. It was this article entitled Out-
lines for a Criticism of Political Economy that marked the begin-
ning of a lifelong friendship. The two men had found a close
correspondence between their conceptions of history and society.
Strangely enough Engels, while apart from Marx, hit upon the idea
of economic interpretation. Like Wallace in the case of Darwin,
Engels was first to admit that Marx’s discovery was wholly inde-
pendent and that the Marxian explanation was “scientific.”

Until he had met Karl Marx ^nd was converted, Friedrich Engels
was an utopian socialist. During an active business career he man-
aged to find abundant opportunity to think about economic

MARX

Under the stimulus of Engels, Marx began to formulate his ideas
more and more clearly, and to cast about for something upon which
to sharpen his teeth. He soon found it in his one time friend Bruno
Bauer.

Bauer, typical of the young Hegelians, had failed to heed Marx’s
call for a reorganization of the dialectical heritage of Hegel on
a more realistic basis. Bauer persisted in maintaining the mystical
doctrine that ideas and great men are the only sources of his-
torical movements. Marx, of course, used the Hegelian formula of
thesis, antithesis and synthesis, but he substituted a naturalistic
principle (which he identified with the economic factors of exist-
ence) for the Hegelian notion of the absolute idea. In other words,
Marx called for a dialectic of economic conditions and develop-
ment.

Now it so happened that Bauer and his brother Edgar had
founded a new paper in which they attacked the Marxian tend-
ency in Hegelianism. Marx, with the assistance of Engels, hastened
to reply in a book which made its appearance under the sarcastic
title Die Heilige Familie (The Holy Family).

For us the book is exceedingly valuable not so much because of
its bitter polemic but because we find in its pages the first clear
statement of the theory of the economic interpretation. “Do these
gentlemen think that they can understand the first word of his-
tory,” asks Marx, “as long as they exclude the relations of man to
nature, natural science and industry? ... Do they believe that they
can actually comprehend any epoch without grasping the industry
of the period, the immediate methods of production in actual life?”
He ridicules the airy philosophers who refuse to see that the birth-
place of history is not in the clouds of heaven but in the gross mate-
rial production of the earth on which they stand. Change in human
society does not originate from the metaphysical idea, the Hegelian
Weltgeist, or any such speculative notion, but from the material

255

problems. Because of their complexity he was eagerly seeking a
more satisfactory approach when Marx expounded his views.
Straightway Engels became the first Marxian disciple, second only
to Marx in insight, comprehension and self-sacrifice.

256 ARCHITEGTS OF IDEAS

conditions of life. For this reason the economic foundation, Marx
argued, was the Unterbau (basis) of society which has always deter-
mined the Ofoerhau (superstructure) of art, religion and science.

As he advanced further in economic history Marx attacked the
older socialists in the person of Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-
1865). The French capital at this period literally swarmed with
social theorists. There were anarchists, socialists, communists,
Weitlingists, Proudhonists, syndicalists, Cabetians, Fourierists,
Owenites— ail agreeing in their condemnation of the old system,
but bitterly opposing one another in their conceptions of how that
system should be changed. To Marx it was clear that the diversity
of views was due to each man’s “opinion.” Now, the true definition
of opinion is ignorance of facts, for where there are facts there is
no need of opinion. Furthermore, who is to decide between opinions
and declare this right and that wrong? Marx asked men to set aside
their opinions and get down to the basic facts of the interrelation-
ship of economics and history.

Just as Darwin found it necessary to set aside the biblical doc-
trine of special creation in order to study nature scientifically, so
too did Marx have to set aside all utopian doctrines in order to
study the phenomena of society. Both Darwin and Marx dealt with
vast and intricate phenomena. Both had to demolish current doc-
trines. Both accomplished the demolition of time-honored fallacies
through the irresistible impact of facts. Unlike Darwin, Marx did
not experiment, for the position of an economist is different from
that of a biologist.

Against all the dreamers, all the Utopians, all the sentimentalists,
Karl Marx turned the battering-ram of science. Of what value are
the many idealistic schemes to create a better human society when
they are based upon no sound understanding of the causes for the
evils which men desire to overcome? Why carelessly spin out of thin
air farfetched notions of a perfect state? Are not social conditions
bound up with productive power? Then why dream of changing
things without first understanding the nature of productive power?
Anybody can dream, said. Marx, and so the philosophers give us
all kinds of schemes, but the essential thing is to possess such accu-

MARX

rate knowledge of the facts of the inner mechanism of history that
society can be changed because of those Mcts. It was this inner
mechanism that the Utopians lacked; they had no dialectical ap-
proach (Marx undertook fo teach dialectics to Proudhon!); no
method of social analysis; in a word they were unscientific.

Furthermore, to these Utopians socialism was in no way bound
with space and time. They thought that it could be established at
any time, at any place, without any reference whatsoever to the
stage of economic development. It was only necessary— they naively
believed— that men should come as quickly as possible to the con-
scious realization of what is good for them and, behold! the present
system of society could be changed. Thus the Utopians based their
arguments upon an appeal to human nature to right all wrong.

To Marx, this entire point of view was utterly unscientific.
Socialism, as a mere scheme calculated to improve the material
conditions of society, had to be rejected as utopian. History had
taught him that social systems cannot be changed at will. No magic
spells or incantations can metamorphose the world. He had discov-
ered that social systems are but a reflex of their economic founda-
tion and therefore cannot be changed except as there has been a
change in the economic foundation. For this reason Marx called for
the economic interpretation, emphasizing the fact that economic
interests, which are behind human behavior as well as human
thinking, are rooted in the modes of production and exchange. “In
the social production which men carry on they enter into definite
relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these
relations of production correspond to a definite stage of develop-
ment of their material powers of production.”

Production, in other words, is the foundation of history; with
a change in the foundation a corresponding change in the entire
superstructure will follow. No system of society, declared Marx,
can be established whenever and wherever we have a notion of
establishing it. “No social order ever disappears before all the pro-
ductive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed;
and new higher relations of production never appear before the
material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb
of the old society.” Simply put, economic interpretation led Marx
to the position that a better system of society can take the place

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

258

of a wrong system only at a certain definite time, when certain con-
ditions exist and when society has reached a certain degree of
economic evolution. This Marxian point of view implies, of course,
the dialectical approach to society. For this reason the task of the
social scientist is not one of inventing a perfect system but of ex-
amining the “historico-economic succession of events” which pro-
duces struggle '(antithesis) and of discovering the material facts des-
tined to serve as a means of ending the conflict (synthesis). The
future state cannot be manufactured by any world reformer.

In the thick of all these intellectual labors Marx together with
Engel was busy waging fierce war on the Prussian government and
taking a very active part in the seething life of the revolutionary
groups of Paris. The Prussian government complained to France
that the attacks upon its dignity were increasing in coarseness and
impudence. At first the French government was reluctant to do
anything in the matter, but was finally persuaded by Alexander
von Humboldt to take steps against Marx, Ruge, Bakunin and
others. On the eleventh day of January, 1845, Marx was expelled
from Paris. He crossed over into Belgium and settled down in Brus-
sels where he lived until 1848.

Marx in Brussels was no different from Marx in Paris, the same
astonishing thinker and revolutionist. He had been in Brussels only
a short time when he received a book from Proudhon entitled The
Philosophy of Poverty. “I await the lash of your criticism,” wrote
the author to Marx.

He got it.

In refutation Marx wrote not on the philosophy of poverty but on
the Poverty of Philosophy. It was an unforgettable and stinging
rebuke which created a sensation and added much to Marx’s repu-
tation.

. Proudhon’s ideals were those of a peasant socialism, a primitive
division of society into small communities without any strong cen-
tral authority. Casting aside industrialism as an unmitigated evil,
he sought to return to the days when the land, not machinery, was
, the source of livelihood. He recognized dimly what Marx himself
^ was soon to demonstrate brilliantly: that labor was the source of

MARX

259

value and that capital without labor was valueless. Proudhon knew
from his superficial study of Hegelian dialectic (conducted in Paris
under Marx’s aegis) that wealth and poverty, capitalist and prole-
tariat, were concomitant and necessary to each other in the present
system; but this was as far as his analysis penetrated.

For all its looseness of reasoning and recklessness of conclusions
Proudhon’s book met with a great popular reception. So great, in
fact, was the attention it received that any answer to it was bound
to be widely read.

Proudhon’s essential error, which Marx exposed, was the concept
of eternal, unchanging economic categories: the mistake of assum-
ing that the economic and social forces in 1847 were those of all
time. With devastating clearness Marx showed that Proudhon had
no historical sense, apparently no realization of the march, shift and
evolution of historical institutions. If he had, he would have known
that the relations in which the forces of production manifest them-
selves are not eternal laws but correspond to definite changes in man
and his productive forces. The principles, ideas and categories of a
society are shaped conformably with the social relations flowing
from production. The conception of private property, for exarople,
changes in each historical epoch in a series of entirely different
social relations. Money itself is not a definite fixed thing but a
social relation, a reflex of a form of production which had rendered
obsolete the system of exchanges of goods between individuals. And
as for machinery it is “not any more of an economic category than
is the ox that pulls the plow; it is a productive force.’’ Social life
at any given time, therefore, is the product of economic evolution.
Suppose, by way of illustration, that a glass contains a liquid or
powder. While the glass does not determine the nature of the liquid
or powder, it does determine its shape. So does economic evolution
determine the social, political and spiritual life of man.

Furthermore, argued Marx, it is ridiculous to think that all one
need do to reform the world is to remove the evil elements from
society and leave only the “good.” Each society is the product of
its internal clashes, its inherent oppositions; the proletariat can only
exist as a proletariat as long as there are capitalists to exploit it.
What the proletariat should do is this: not seek to eliminate the
capitalists alone, but to eliminate itself as proletariat; in other

architects of ideas

260

words, to establish a classless society in which exploitation of one
class by another would not exist.

The theory of economic interpretation had at last been placed
before the world. But there was still work to be done. The next step
was to form the organization that would carry the banner of this
new theory to the workers, spread the new gospel, promote the now
clearly anticipated social revolution. A more definite relation be-
tween the abstract theory and the concrete immediate realities of
the political situation had to be established. This Marx and Engels
now proceeded to accomplish.

Europe had been for several years in a state of ferment. In Eng-
land the trade union movement was making great headway, and
the Chartist agitation was in full force. In Germany the working-
men in large numbers were becoming socialists of one kind or
another. Democratic agitation against the reactionary monarchy
frothed and bubbled in a series of upheavals. The Parisian prole-
tariat was also beginning to realize its own class consciousness.
Marx felt himself in the midst of an era of revolution and sought
an opportuniy to co-ordinate the proletariat in a drive to over-
throw capitalism and establish the Communist society.

Since 1836 the refugees from German political persecution had
been organized in Paris under the name of the League of the Just,
and branches had been formed in the principal European cities.
In the Brussels chapter Marx soon began to dominate the scene;
with Engels he conducted extensive propaganda for the organization
throughout Europe. At the first Congress, held in London in 1847,
they managed to gain partial control and effect the transformation
of the League of the Just, which hitherto had had no definite policy,
into the Communist League with a Marxian viewpoint. To estab-
lish this policy definitely Marx and Engels hastened to the business
of drafting a manifesto which should declare the aims and policies
of the League.

. The result was the Communist Manifesto (the document which
: has guided socialist and communist doctrine for more than seventy-
|§|i!|^iii||l^^pifipt|gg;Cdmmimi$t;::Leagul|jaiitte
organization of the now clearly defined revolutionary proletariat.

MARX

261

Almost immediately after the writing of the Mani/esfe^ the Feb-
ruary revolution of 1848 broke out in Paris. Marx went there at
the invitation of the Provisional Government after Belgium had
deemed it advisable to expel him from Brussels. In March revolu-
tion flared in Germany, and Marx hurried to take part in it. All
Europe was seething. In the excitement of immediate political
events the Manifesto gained only a brief, if approving, perusal by
the workingmen of Europe. For in June came the bloody suppres-
sion by Cavaignac of the proletarian uprising in Paris, and the
establishment of the rule of the bourgeoisie more firmly than ever.
At the same time in Germany the counterrevolution began to gain
headway, and reaction set in once more. Uprisings continued all
over Europe, to which Marx lent his encouragement and support.
But the bolt was shot; the bourgeoisie was firmly in the saddle.
Marx, who had recognized the first revolts as bourgeois movements
and had regarded them as necessary steps to the proletarian revolu-
tion, now realized that his zeal had led him to hope for more than
actuality permitted. Because of the prevailing economic distress,
he hoped for a renewal of proletarian discontent and revolutionary
sentiment, but now an accident stepped in to help save the day for
capitalism. Gold was discovered in California! The resulting bet-
terment in economic conditions all over the world caused a revival
that dashed Marx’s hopes to the ground. By the summer of 1850
he was advocating the liquidation of the revolution and the disband-
ing of the Communist League, for its economic basis for existing
was gone. Thus the force of hard economic reality brought the
zealot Marx back to the calm consideration of his revolutionary
program, which in the mad hope for immediate realization he had
neglected to apply as carefully and conscientiously as he himself
had urged it be applied.

But the Communist Manifesto remained the challenge of the
labor movement. And it is still the Manifesto that, in its brief pages,
Tepresents the succinct outline of Marxian teaching based upon the
theory of the economic interpretation of history.

The Manifesto states that “the history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles,” and what, asked Marx, is

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

262

the natui-e of the conflict on which the historical process depends?
He answers this question by saying that it is a conflict of class
based on the possession of the means of economic production.

Let us see how he works it out.

In every age there have been a ruling and a serving class, an
upper and a lower crust. In every age this distinction has been
imposed and determined by the current means of production. In
every age a bitter struggle has been waged between oppressor and
oppressed, between rich and poor, between the possessors and the
non-possessors. And that struggle continues even now and cannot
cease until all classes are abolished and all antagonisms resolved.

Marx traced the development of the modern bourgeoisie from
the time it broke the shell of feudalism and began to spread itself
through the towns and villages of the Middle Ages. From the
medieval serfs had sprung the chartered burghers of the earliest
towns; from these burgesses the elements of the bourgeoisie had
arisen. The discovery of America, the expansion of world-wide
markets, opened up new ground for the rising merchant and manu-
facturing class. Manufacturing had begun because the old guild
system of production by the hands of artisans was incapable of
meeting the greatly increased demand for goods. The markets kept
ever growing, and manufacture by hand mills no longer sufficed; so
machinery was introduced to increase and speed up production.

Out of the growth of the bourgeoisie there emerged for the first
time the “world” market with its international commerce and
tremendous means of communication. And as the bourgeoisie
advanced economically, it advanced politically: feudal lords, medie-
val communes, city-republics— all these forms were rendered obsolete
as the bourgeoisie gradually forced its way from the status of a
taxable "third estate” to that of supremacy. The creation of modern
capitalist society is a direct reflex of the interests of the middle

But more than that, the bourgeoisie in its progress revolutionized
all the old values of medieval life— the chivalry, culture, ideology,
beauty and even the religious motives. It substituted for the old
order the point of view of the merchant, a money relationship in
every department of life. - ,

with the rise of the bourgeoisie there grew up a prole-

MARX

263

tarian class. The bourgeoisie, necessarily, could not endure with-
out a proletariat to give it labor power sufficient to meet the ever-
expanding need for products, commodities, markets. In so doing,
the emphasis had been shifted from the country to the town. The
great city, teeming with proletarians, was the modern political cen-
ter. Centralization was constantly going on, concentrating property
more and more in a few hands, expropriating more and more those
who had been left behind in the race for markets and trade.

Now, if the above picture of economic change can be clearly seen,
the next step, according to Marx, is to understand it dialectically.
How? The thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is as follows. The
bourgeoisie or capital-owning class has established a monopoly of
the means of production. In so doing it has called into existence
its antithesis, a capital-less laboring class of the proletariat. The
conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat, between capital and
labor, will finally resolve the antithesis and produce the synthesis,
a classless society.

In calling upon the proletarians of the world to unite Marx felt
that it was the task of the Communist Manifesto to awaken revo-
lutionary class consciousness, to have ready a program of action
when it finally awakens, and to lead the way to the new society
wherein the dictatorship of the proletariat would gradually emerge
into a classless society. From this point Marx went on to outline
his own proposals over against the proposals of other groups which
made their appeal to the working class— such groups as the French
socialists and the followers of Robert Owen. These he classified
as reformers, bourgeois liberals, and Utopians. Once more he out-
lined the failings of their doctrines, as he had already done in his
case against Proudhon.

Thus when he was not yet thirty Marx had achieved almost
enough of a career for any man; but, of course, he had no thought
of retiring and letting others work out the principles he had given
to the world. He continued his work, plunged in the very heart of
the revolutionary movement.

During the German revolution he had established the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung which in its short existence carried some of his
most brilliant articles. He called on the citizens to offer armed re-
sistance to attempts at tax collections by the reactionary Branden-

264 ARCHITECTS OF ideas

burg ministry. Arrested and tried at Cologne, he was acquitted after
making a brilliant speech in his own defense. Uprisings in Dresden
and the Rhine Province, led by Bakunin, evoked his hearty sup-
port. With their collapse came his abrupt expulsion from Prussia
and the suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. He issued a
final edition, printed in red ink, and went to Paris. But before
going to Paris, Marx, feeling morally responsible for the debts con-
tracted, pawned all he had. His wife assisted him in giving up.
precious heirlooms, silver and furniture. It would have been easy
to leave without paying, but Marx would not. With all his hatred
of the institution of private property he had a vivid sense of honor.

In Paris, Marx witnessed the second uprising which was sup-
pressed in July, 1849, when Louis Bonaparte gained the throne.
Once more he was told to get out, and he hastened to seek refuge
in London. A few days later he was followed by his family. Here
he remained, except for short intervals, for the remainder of his life.

When Marx finally settled down in London in 1849
enjoyed the distinction of being expelled from three European
countries and of having seen three of his journalistic ventures
collapse.

Now began a period of great hardship. Money was constantly
scarce in spite of a legacy Jenny received from her mother. Even
periodic help coming from the loyal Engels, who sent the Marxes
all he could spare from his income as a clerk, was hardly enough.
In 1851 Marx managed to get work writing weekly articles for
Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, which was much interested
in the liberal-radical movements in Europe. But at a sovereign an
article he hardly managed to pay his rent and postage, while piece
after piece of apparel and furniture found its way to the pawn-

sbrc^er.,:^:;-;: :

To make matters worse, illness began to plague him, what with
a liver disorder and other ailments aggravated by his practice of
working late at night, taking insufficient nourishment, and smok-
ing vile cigars. Fortunately for Marx he was a powerfully built
man with a constitution that could stand long years of maltreat-
.ment and neglect. His personal ^pearance was .always impressive.

MARX

265

He was not a tall man, but he had a tremendous leonine head.
Hyndman’s description of him (though referring to a much later
date) is, in essentials, true of him all along, “commanding fore-
head, great overhanging brow, fierce glittering eyes, broad sensitive
nose and mobile mouth, all surrounded by a setting of untrimmed
hair and beard.”

Despite exile and poverty Marx felt that he had a task to com-
plete. He had projected a theory of history that had made available
a vast storehouse of hitherto unknown or disregarded facts, thereby
demonstrating most vividly the impoverishment of orthodox inter-
pretation; he had made a courageous effort to show how that theory
might be applied to history; and upon the basis of that theory
he essayed to outline a program for the revolutionary labor
movement. Now, in exile, he wanted to write a searching and
thoroughgoing criticism of capitalist economy, mark clearly the
contradictions of the present system which his previous works had
only shadowed, and dispose once and for all of ■ the orthodox,
apologist analyses of the bourgeois economics.

All his days and evenings were spent in the library of the British
Museum reading innumerable files of newspapers, assimilating thou-
sands of articles, making notes from books of every conceivable
shade of opinion and subject. Each morning he was at the door
of the Museum as it opened, and never did he leave until the
attendants turned him out. He seemed to be a veritable part of
the institution, this dark, heavily-bearded German with piercing
black eyes, sitting at a desk with dozens of volumes piled about
him. Later on he developed a circle of co-workers who came with
him, and aided him in his research. While his research activities
continued at the Museum, Marx did not withdraw from active
participation in the labor movement. He took great interest in the
British trade unionism and in the Chartists who fought so stren-
uously for ideals very close to his own.

In 1859, the year that saw the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of
Species, Marx published his Introduction to the Critique of Political
Economy, in which he presented an excellent definition of his the-
ory of economic interpretation and explained how it had led him
to attempt an analysis of capitalist economy.

266

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Meantime, he was constantly in the midst of polemic, politics,
discussions and quarrels with friends and enemies. Marx was a fiery,
not-to-be-contradicted man on most occasions, and it was only by
the tremendous force of his personality and the vigor of his ideas
that he retained what friends he did. He had quarreled with Bauer,
Proudhon, Herwegh, Bakunin, Ruge— and each time with intense
bitterness.

Now he split with Ferdinand Lassalle, who had been his colleague
on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and with Karl Vogt over the
question of Louis Napoleon’s plan to aid Italy’s unification by a
treaty with Sardinia against Austria. He saw in it a scheme to
further Napoleon’s own aims and denounced it as such, attacking
Lassalle and Karl Vogt bitterly for their support. Time has proved
Marx right, but Lassalle never forgave, and Marx never sought
forgiveness for the vehemence of the attack. Vogt lashed out at
Marx, calling him slanderer and degenerate. So outraged was Marx
that he prepared an entire volume in reply, Herr Vogt, in which he
denounced his adversary as a paid agent of Napoleon. Here again
Marx was vindicated, for when the French Republic eleven years
later published the secret accounts of the Bonaparte government,
there was the item in the secret service funds, “Vogt, received
August, 1859, forty thousand francs.’’

It is difficult to pass any final judgment on the personality of
Karl Marx. Most of his enemies and many of his friends found him
harsh, severe, unpleasant; and the general impression prevailed that
this was the true aspect of the man. But we have to set against these
strictures the evidence of such a man as Heine, who testified to
Marx’s real charm. “Marx is the tenderest, gentlest man I have
ever known.” Marx may, as is claimed for him, have made govern-
ments tremble, but he never made his wife or children tremble.
His was the happiest of family circles. To the children on the
London streets, with whom he was always ready to play, he was
known affectionately as “Daddy Marx.”

In any just appraisal of Karl Marx there are two aspects of the
man to be considered. There is on the one hand the patient, cold
logician, analyzing history with the scalpel of fact and the probe

MARX

267

of theory; there is also the impetuous, sentimental revolutionary,
seizing upon tiny uprisings as the first step in an imminent world
revolution that was soon to establish the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat and the classless society.

His economic doctrines fall short of the caliber of his theory
of the economic interpretation of history, because so many of his
conclusions are a priori, wish-fulfillment ones. He was seeking evi-
dence that capitalism was going to collapse and the working-class
come to power; he grabbed at every shred that could be used to
demonstrate this thesis, and now and then turned his back on
important data that were not directly in line with it.

Marx had also the tendency to rationalize his earnest desire for
revolution, often going to amusing extremes in a childish enthusi-
asm. He once came home full of this enthusiasm: he had seen,
in an exhibition on Regent Street, the model of an electric
locomotive. This symbol of the rapid advance of the industrial
revolution he interpreted in terms of his own hopes as meaning
that the economic basis for the political revolution was rapidly
nearing completion. Like a child he talked for days of the impend-
ing revolution, until his ordinary good sense reasserted itself and
he regained his logical perspective.

One aspect of this wish-fulfillment trait may be found in his
literary style. His inversion of Proudhon’s title The Philosophy
of Poverty to the Poverty of Philosophy is a prominent example.
He constantly sought brilliant rhetorical effects by the use of this
device of inversion, such as, “The weapon of criticism cannot re-
place the criticism of weapons,” “Luther shattered faith in author-
ity, because he restored the authority of faith,” “Philosophy cannot
be realized without the abolition of the proletariat; the proletariat
cannot abolish itself without realizing philosophy.” Now, while this
technique demonstrates the dialectic basis of thought, Marx realized
its dangers— a too facile phrasing and grouping of apparent an-
titheses. In his later work Marx got away from this habit, but it
is an example of a tendency to lose, sometimes, the fine edge of his
logic in a blasting thunderous rhetoric.

268 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

A stroke of bad luck met him in 1861. With the outbreak of the
Civil War in America he lost his small income from the New York
Tribune.

As far as the Civil War itself was concerned, although he was
fully aware that it represented a clash between opposing groups
in the ruling class, he nevertheless was heartily in favor of the
Northern cause. Quite apart from his philosophical and historical
convictions, he was sufficiently imbued with the pure love of free-
dom to be thoroughly opposed to the institution of chattel slavery.
What is more, he was instrumental in aiding the Northern cause
by more than mere tacit approval. When the Gladstone ministry
in Great Britain was playing with the idea of recognizing the South-
ern Confederacy and granting it large credits, it was Marx who
helped organize the great demonstration of the British working
class that compelled Gladstone to change his mind.

He xvas beginning to assume more and more importance in the
trade union movement of England; and when the second Interna-
tional Exhibition %vas held in London in 1862, he helped to bring
together the visiting workingmen from France and other countries,
and the idea of forming an international organization was discussed.

Marx worked feverishly for this goal. In September, 1864, he had
the pleasure of attending, as the representative of German labor,
the meeting at which was formed the International Workingmen’s
Association— the first International. It was not from the start a
Marxian organization; from 1865 to 1867 the followers of Proudhon
officially dominated it. In the meantime Marx disseminated his
views and finally gained power. This the Marxists held until the
adherents of Bakunin, now a thoroughgoing anarchist, forced an
entrance into the organization and in a few years split it from head
to foot and caused its collapse.

During its career the International was the medium through
which the theory of the economic interpretation of history was
publicized. Even the followers of Bakunin and Proudhon, although
opposed to Marx's program and antagonized by the aggressiveness
of his personality, were completely convinced of his main thesis—

MARX 269

the economic basis. The theory had become a definite part of the
heritage of knowledge.

Meanwhile his work on his greatest book had been going forward.
By the end of January, 1867, the copying of the first volume of
Das Kapital was completed; Marx planned a trip to Germany to
arrange for its publication.

With the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital the great
economic theorist produced his crowning work. He never was able
to finish editing and collating the tremendous mass of material
collected for the second and third volumes; Engels did this for
him after his death. But the first volume was enough: it needed
no New Testament to bring this work rapidly to its present posi-
tion as the Bible of the working-class.

The chief characteristic of capitalism, says Marx, is the dis-
crepancy between the value that labor produces and the value
that it receives in return in the form of wages. This discrepancy,
which Marx called surplus value (it may be recognized under many
names: unearned increment, interest, profits, return of investment,
etc.) is what the capitalist takes for himself, as the reward for his
"contribution” to the process of production. Marx asserted that
since all value was created by labor— he took this as an axiom—
what the capitalist reserved was stolen goods; and the only thing
that allowed him to make good his theft was, of course, the fact
that he controlled the state and that his class was the ruling class.

Marx’s searching analyses of capitalism and his prediction as
to the course it would take have been proved astonishingly accu-
rate by a multitude of facts since his dearth. The recurrent crises
he predicted have come again and again, always with increasing
severity. The mad scramble of the expanding bourgeois class for
new markets has been amply demonstrated by events in China,
Africa, South and Central America.

When the second edition of Das Kapital was published in 1873,
Marx sent a copy to Darwin, who responded:

Dear Sir:

I thank you for the honor which you have done me by

sending me your great work on Capital; and I heartily wish

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

270

that I were more wortliy to receive it, by understanding more
of the deep and important subject of political economy.
Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we
both earnestly desire the extension of knowledge; and this, in
the long run, is sure to add to the happiness of mankind. I
remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,

Charles Darwin.

Toward the end of his life poverty released its grip somewhat,
and Marx was able to indulge himself in one of the prerogatives
of age— mellowness. His circle of friends had widened, and with his
wife and children and friends he became a tenderer and less bitter
person.

But it was not all primroses and honey, Marx’s old age. There
was the split-up of the International by the destructive tactics of
Bakunin. There were constant arguments with his friends on ques-
tions of doctrine, Marx trying to adhere to the straight line pointed
out by his theory, never tolerating the utopian withdrawals and
petty-bourgeois modifications that liberals and opponents sought
to introduce. By an uncompromising belligerency for his ideas
Marx, however, set a bad example to his disciples who sought to
emulate him with arrogance and almost dogmatic assurance. Not-
withstanding all this, he was a man who beneath a sometimes rough
exterior hid a boundless love for all who labor and are heavy-
laden.

His illness grew increasingly difficult to bear; terrible headaches
clouded his working hours. But he remained active, interested,
always fighting for his revolution. He added Russian to his already
wide mastery of languages and launched into a study of rural con-
ditions in that country. He saw another uprising of the proletariat
crushed in France in 1870, when the Paris Commune, after seven
weeks of brilliant efforts to establish a workers’ state, fell before
the assault of reaction. Another hope was shattered. Marx, how-
ever, never lost his courage and his faith. To his last moment he was
fighting for his ideas. In a life of ostracism, exile, and grinding
poverty he refused all compromise.

One of his younger colleagues once said to him, ‘T marvel, com-

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271

rade, that you who have struggled so long can he so patient.” Marx
replied, “When you have been impatient as long as I, you will not
marvel at my patience.”

He suffered a tremendous shock when in December of 1881 his
wife, the companion of his vast career of trials and hardships, was
taken from him. Engels said, when he heard the news, “Marx is
dead, too.”

It was true. The shock was more than he could bear, and when
a year later his eldest daughter died suddenly, grief overwhelmed
his powerful physique and he collapsed.

All his old ailments beset him now with new force; he returned
from his daughter’s funeral to die. The doctors however hoped
to keep him alive, and he himself thought once more that he
would be able after all to finish Das Kapital. But it was not to be.

On the afternoon of March 14, 1883, Friedrich Engels hastened
to the Marx home at 45 Maitland Park Road, Haverstock Hill. He
had received an urgent summons from the family. Marx had had
a heart attack, and it was feared that he might die at any moment.
Engels ran upstairs to the study. There was Marx seated in an
annchair; he seemed to be asleep, but when Engels reached the
chair Karl Marx was dead.

11. Pasteur

THEORY OF DISEASE

WHEN Christopher Columbus had returned from his voyages and
the Spanish Empire was glorying in the unexpected enlargement
of its dominions, something else that apparently had been found
in the New World was impressing itself upon the attention of the
early sixteenth century. A new disease, fierce and virulent, had made
its initial appearance in Europe. Syphilis had flung down its gaunt-
let in challenge to the medical science of the day.

Syphilis is caused by a tiny unseen organism which enters the
human body where it reproduces in great numbers, often destroy-
ing as it goes. The information about syphilis which is common
knowledge of today, was unknown to the most eminent doctors of
the fifteenth century when the disease (which apparently was
brought back from the West Indies by some of the companions of
Columbus) made its first appearance in Europe to the consternation
of civilization.

Whether or not syphilis was introduced from America or had
existed previously in Europe, it now began to attract attention.
Girolamo Eracastorius, a celebrated physician of Verona, inter-
ested himself in this new disease. It was he who composed a famous
medical poem around the character of a shepherd whom he called
Syphilis. The poem first appeared in 1550, and although Fracas-
torius said the legend was written in his lighter moments, it brought
him more fame than all his scientific writings. In the poem we are
told the story of Syphilis the shepherd who, for an act of impiety,
was strack with the disease. However, in his scientific study of
syphilis (then called the French pox) Fracastorius set forth rational
views of infection that were truly remarkable for that far-off age.
He came very near expressing the modem conception of bacter-
ial infections. Upon examination it must be said that Fracastor-

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273

ius’ views bear a superficial resemblance to Pasteur’s germ theory.

There exist, Fracastorius asserted, tiny seeds of infection, semi-
naria contagionum. These can be transmitted from one person to
another— either by direct or indirect contact— through articles of
clothing or furniture touched in common, or at a distance, by means
of the wind. Thus diseases spread in the population as a whole,
because of these essential seeds that cause infection and are capable
of indefinite multiplication.

Fracastorius also described the affinity that particular seeds have
for particular kinds of people, or particular species of animals,
or a particular sex. Some men could walk unharmed through a
pestilence that was destroying a community about them. There is
even an affinity for certain parts of the body; one kind of infec-
tious particle or seed attacked only the lungs, another kind laid
waste only the kidneys.

He not only described these things but permitted himself certain
speculations about them. There can be no doubt that had he pos-
sessed a microscope he would have made tremendous strides tovrard
establishing an adequate germ theory. (The microscope unfortu-
nately did not come into use until a hundred years later.) For the
age in which it appeared Fracastorius’ book was a remarkable docu-
ment, but it failed to overthrow current beliefs. Medicine con-
tinued to plow its way along the bottom of the rut of tradition,
dinging to remnants of witchcraft, spells, medieval superstitions.

Besides syphilis, Fracastorius was interested in all infectious dis-
eases; and in those day, when medicine made no distinction be-
tween the contagious kind of ailment and any other, to have rec-
ognized the fact of infection was in itself a great advance. He
described contagion as a sort of putrefaction caused by particles not
perceived by our senses. He recognized the contagiousness of
measles, tuberculosis, smallpox, rabies and above all syphilis. The
dread plague which at one time forced the Pope to consecrate the
river Rhone, so that the multitudes of dead could be thrown into
it without delay; the medieval epidemics of “dancing mania” which
ravaged entire countries; the weird scourge of leprosy that had been
known and abhored since Bible times— all these Fracastorius studied
and classified and sought to trace to their origins.

In 1546 he published a remarkably Treatise on Contagion which

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

274

is a fascinating series of bold hypotheses and speculations. It is also
a magnificent example of the elementary awakening of creative
thinking in medicine.

Fracastorius did not arrive at his ideas of infection by pure
guesswork; he had carefully observed the diseases of which he
wrote. No physician of the age worked harder through the epi-
demics and plagues. With a vast clinical experience and one of
the largest practices in Italy he even found time to attempt some
crude experiments to test his hypotheses. In the annals of science
Fracastorius is assigned a singularly important place as the first
person to draw a parallel between the processes of contagion and
the fermentation of wine— a luminous juxtaposition!

Centuries later Pasteur spread the co-ordinating wings of his
genius over these same processes and found the way to his theory.

While the other sciences were moving forward on all fronts,
medicine lagged behind, groping in the dark against unknown ene-
mies. Physicians did not fully understand what they were fighting
when they undertook to free a patient of disease: they could note
symptoms, take pulses and temperatures, but their prescriptions
were compounded of guesswork, hearsay and tradition. A glaring
example of the profound ignorance was the doctrine of “laudable
pus.” This view upheld the notion that pus was a necessary and
beneficial accompaniment in a wound of any kind. So general was
the belief that pus aided healing that it survived well up into the
end of the nineteenth century!

Surgeons today make every effort to avoid the formation of pus,
knowing it to be the herald of infection and blood poisoning. But
these fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth century surgeons
invented one method after another to bring about suppuration,
not understanding that the means they used to cause pus to appear
were at the same time the means of dooming the patient to almost
certain death. Only a few men opposed the idea of laudable pus.
Henri de Mondeville (1260-1320), one of them, wrote trenchantly:
“Many more surgeons know how to cause suppuration than to heal
a wound.” He and a few others pleaded for cleanliness in surgery.
The only result was a storm of abuse and ridicule.

PASTEUR

275

Medieval doctors were completely at a loss in battling plagues,
those fearful, devastating pestilences which swept over Europe,
leaving an awful trail of corpses and misery. Nearly everybody
attributed them to the influences of the stars, to the appearance of
comets, to droughts, to inundations, to Jews who poisoned the wells,
to crop failures. Sometimes medical authorities came closer to the
truth when, for example, they supposed that mice or swarms of
insects might have something to do with it. But they never thought
to follow out the hints Fracastorius had dropped.

In the seventeenth century there were two men who seemed
to foreshadow to a certain degree the insight into the nature of
disease that Louis Pasteur was to bring. These two were widely dif-
fering personalities: Thomas Sydenham of London, clinician, an
observer of disease, master of the healing arts, a man of single-
mindedness of purpose; and Athanasius Kircher of Fulda, opti-
cian, musician, physician. Orientalist, mathematician, creator of
hypotheses and gifted with many intuitions in wide-ranging fields of
knowledge.

The Englishman Sydenham (1624-1689), whose motto was “Ex-
perience, not reason, is what teaches,” was a fanatical enemy of
every theory. Yet he wrote in a hopeful spirit about the future of
medicine. In a day when doctors were reluctant to admit any limi-
tation to their healing arts this “English Hippocrates” stressed the
inadequacy of current knowledge. One of the hopes voiced by
Sydenham was that for each and every disease there might be
developed a specific remedy as absolutely effective as quinine was
known to be for malaria. This too was opposed to the general
trend of thought, which in those days was serene in the vague belief
that somewhere there existed one perfect panacea, that would in-
stantly heal each human ill, from insanity to boils.

Sydenham, studying the nature of contagion, which he clearly
recognized in his investigation of the plague when it struck Lon-
don, knew that not only delicate persons were subject to contagion,
but that a strong man who went into an infected area might surely
sicken in a day or two. He felt that disease was caused by “infectious
particles,” which are taken in with the very air we breathe. He
hoped that some day the nature of these particles would be ascer-
tained. Nor was he wrong in this long-range expectation. History

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276

has shown that Syndenham belonged to that elect company whose
hopes are slowly absorbed in the impersonal life of the times that
follow them.

The case of Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) was different. Here
was a professor of philosophy who loved to speculate. From some
mountain top of his own creation he was forever peering into the
vast unknown with new and quickened perceptions. In addition
to his achievements in mathematics and oriental languages he will
always be remembered as the first investigator to use the microscope
in an attempt to discover the causes of disease. By a flash of imagina-
tive genius, the expression of long-continued processes of thinking,
he hit upon the nature of contagion. It was more than a guess: it
was bold penetration, the work of an alert speculative mind in
quest of an explanation.

An hypothesis is the presumption of the existence of the general
state of affairs lying at the back of certain phenomena. A good
hypothesis will eventually allow conclusions to be drawn; and if
the hypothesis be correct the new conclusions will be confirmed and
these in turn will give added confirmation to the truth of the
hypothesis. The fact that fevers are catching, that epidemics spread,
that infection could remain attached to particles of clothing, all
gave support to the view that the actual cause was something alive.

Kircher did not hesitate to announce, and he was the first to
do so clearly, that the infectious particles were living. (Fracastorius
had hesitated to call them living.) To be sure, this was “opinion,”
but it was scientific. Now a scientific opinion is one which there
is some reason to believe true; on the other hand an unscientific
opinion is one which is held for some reason other than its probable
truth.

Of course it is obvious that a supposition is by no means the same
thing as the discovery of a fact. When Leverrier declared that an
eighth planet, Neptune, existed outside Uranus, but had never been
seen by man, or when Mendeleeff prophesied the existence of three
undiscovered chemical elements, these were for the moment only
suppositions which were not proved facts until afterwards. The
same is true of Kircher who rightly assumed that tiny living par-
ticles were the cause of disease. What was more, he investigated
anthrax, bubonic plague, and other scourges. With the aid of his

PASTEUR

microscope he claimed to see in the blood of victims the micro-
organisms that caused disease and he described some of these plague
germs. That of course was his mistake; for we know from his de-
scription that all he saw were the red corpuscles of the blood.

After Sydenham’s and Kircher’s work medical science continued
to struggle valiantly with its problems. Despite slow progress the
necessary foundations were being laid for the great era of Pasteur—
the era that led to intoxicating victory. Everywhere men were fer-
reting out the secrets of the human body, informing themselves
about its working, learning its construction, studying the relation
of function to structure. A clearer acquaintance with disease and
its manifestations was growing. Furthermore, the more intelligent
among physicians, although they still lacked a comprehensive
theory, had been able to work out certain cures and certain pre-
ventive measures which had long baflGled their predecessors.

For example, the idea of cleanliness in operations was gaining
strength. Many medieval surgeons had advocated the use of boiling
oil in a wound to prevent gangrene and septicemia. More and
more opponents to the doctrine of “laudable pus” were coming
forward. In the particular infection of childbirth fever, which car-
ried off thousands of mothers annually, a few men were insisting
upon cleanliness and sanitation as the only means to cut down
this enormous mortality.

As the nineteenth century opened medical science was still con-
fronted by the enigma: What caused disease? To be sure, doctors
possessed a certain bowing acquaintance with disease; they could
in most cases trace its course and often predict its outcome; some-
times they could even prevent its spread by isolating those who
had contracted it. But they did not know how to treat it, be-
cause they did not know its nature.

A ray of hope leading towards the ultimate solution of the
mystery of infectious disease came in the person of Max Joseph von
Pettenkofer who, like Pasteur, was a man of irrepressible genius in
chemistry and a profound theorist. ' ' .

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Pettenkofer, who lived from 1818 to 1901, had one of the most
colorful careers in medicine. He is justly regarded as the founder
of modern hygiene. Unlike the Englishman Sydenham, who was an
enemy of all theories, Pettenkofer was constantly at work framing
hypotheses, not as an idle exercise of the imagination but definitely
as an outgrowth of creative practical affairs. It is said that the people
of Munich often called his physiological institute “The Hypothesis
Palace.”

It must be understood that Pettenkofer did not actually found
hygiene; he had his predecessors. But after he delivered his Lectures
on Hygiene in 1865 at Munich he unquestionably raised this branch
of knowledge to the rank of first magnitude. No scientist before
him had ever possessed his grasp of the subject; no scientist before
him ever approached his passionate insistence on cleanliness. King
Maximilian under whose patronage he worked spent thousands of
florins out of his private funds to promote Pettenkofer’s experi-
ments.

Oftentimes in reading the lives of these scientists-theorists one
is amazed at such immense intellectual ability, ceaseless observa-
tion and vast encyclopedic learning. Pettenkofer, like Pasteur, was
interested in human welfare. “A man of pure science,” he once
wrote, “always concerns himself first with truth.” He must ask him-
self: “What is left from my experiences and from the results of
my thinking that will serve to rejoice the hearts and lighten the
sufferings of those with whom we are together so short a time here
on earth? As a man the savant is bound to think of this, and he is
either a weakling or a monster if he thinks or acts otherwise.”

The work on hygiene was stimulated by the cholera epidemic
that struck Germany in the summer of 1854. Thousands of people
were gathered in Munich to witness the formal opening of the
General Exhibition of Industries in the famous Glass Palace. On
July 15, 1854, the kings of Prussia and Saxony were there to lend
their presence to the glittering occasion. No sooner had the great
fair opened than the dread cry “Cholera!” was heard. People ran
like rats at the continuous ringing of the death bells. Death stalked
in Munich.

The Pettenkofer household did not escape the epidemic. His
faithful cook died and one of his daughters almost succumbed.

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Pettenkofer himself fell ill but quickly recovered. “These experi-
ences naturally came very close to me and prompted me to investi-
gate the ways of cholera.”

After much painstaking work there appeared in 1855 ^ prelimi-
nary report which was followed two years later by a more complete
statement. These reports contained Pettenkofer’s views known as
the “soil” or “nidus” theory. “The origin of cholera,” declares this
theory, “is due essentially to (a) the germ or ferment, which in
itself causes no cholera in the human organism, (b) a material or
soil which receives the first factor and as a result thereof passes into
a fermentation or budding, from which (c) a local miasma arises,
which can cause cholera when it is not left to develop in that place
and is breathed in by men at a certain degree of concentration. In
other words, the sick man furnishes the soil for the harmless germ,
the germ utilizes the soil as a ferment to develop the miasma, and
this under certain conditions generates the cholera.”

Every theory is a forward thrust into the unknown. When Pet-
tenkofer first announced his views (a linking of the contagious and
miasmatic hypotheses) it must be remembered that bacteriology
was in its infancy. In the light of the great gains made later by
Koch and Pasteur a large part of Pettenkofer’s doctrine turned out
to be wrong. Nevertheless it paved the way for victory for it stressed
the production of disease by the fermenting process of decaying
matter.

Merely to read the above classical statement of Pettenkofer’s
theory may not in itself be a particularly thrilling experience. But
it must be remembered that Pettenkofer lived his theory. In a very
true sense it is a statement of his being, of his entire personality,
of his daily thought, practice and capacity for self-sacrifice. Doctor
Axel Munthe in the preface to the American edition of his memo-
rable Story of San Michele speaks scathingly of those who rapsodize
about death from a comfortable distance but actually grow pale
when the grim Deliverer approaches. Was not Leopardi, the great-
est poet of Italy, who longed for death in exquisite rhymes, the
first to fly in abject terror from cholera-stricken Naples? Did not
the great Montaigne, whose calm meditations on death are enough
to make him immortal, bolt like a rabbit when the pest broke out
in Bordeaux? '

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Not so Pettenkofer. On October 7, 1892, he undertook a rare
and moving act of defiance in answer to his colleagues who chal-
lenged his theory. On that day he swallowed a culture of cholera
bacilli sent to him by Professor Gaffky from pest-ridden Hamburg.
It is estimated that he took into his body several millions of the
dangerous germs just to demonstrate that not every infection gen-
erates illness. “Even if I had been deceiving myself and the experi-
ment had been dangerous,” he wrote in explanation, “I would
have looked death in the face calmly.”

Pettenkofer’s demonstration was an heroic act. It proved that
bacteria alone are by no means enough to explain the facts of an
epidemic. Pettenkofer was right, but (and this is often the tragedy
of the theorist) on a mistaken hypothesis!

It was Louis Pasteur, a “mere chemist,” who finally established
the true theory of contagious and infectious diseases. It may have
been because he was a chemist, and consequently free from the con-
servatism and complacency of the medical profession, that he was
able to do it. In all events, his accomplishment remains one of the
enduring victories in the “conquest-march” of the human intellect.

Louis Pasteur was bom in 1822 in a small village in eastern
France. His father, a hardworking tanner, struggled industriously
to be able to give his son the education he himself had never had,
envisioning for him a future as a professor, a savant, or a great
writer.

But the young man did not impress his teachers in the prepara-
tory schools. Although he was careful, he was considered too slow
and plodding. Quite often their patience was tried by his con-
stant insistence on understanding a proposition thoroughly before
going ahead to more advanced stages; too often he irritated and
confused them with questions. Although his examinations for the
degree in chemistry were considered somewhat “mediocre,” the
influence of J. B. Dumas, one of the leading chemists of the day,
whose lectures at the Sorbonne Pasteur attended, led him to a
gripping interest in this science. Perhaps more important than
Dumas’ influence was the practical consideration that this seemed
to be a promising profession to enter. At any rate, Pasteur became

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a chemist and proceeded to apply to this field the earnestness, the
self-discipline and perseverance that his early education had im-
planted in him.

He continued to be slow-moving and methodical; he continued
to ask pointed questions; and he continued to refuse to take things
at face value. In the chemistry class, for instance, the details of
obtaining the substance phosphorus was merely told the students.
(It was too expensive a process to be demonstrated in the labora-
tory.) But Pasteur, always testing, always inquisitive, bought some
bones, took them to his rooms and burnt them, pulverized the ash,
treated it chemically, and was then able to show his fellow students
and his teachers a phial containing sixty grams of phosphorus ob-
tained by his own unaided efforts.

No sooner did he receive his doctor’s degree than he turned
his attention to a problem that was puzzling many chemists. Now
he was to give a clear demonstration of that remarkable penetrating
effort that became so characteristic of his long and illustrious career.
He began by making a profound study of crystalline forms and
their connection with the rotation of polarized light. There were
two acids which had been found to be present in the fermentation
of grapes— tartaric and racemic acids. The crystals formed from these
two substances looked alike, they had the same chemical properties
and the same constituents. There was in fact only one way they
might be distinguished: tartaric acid crystals were optically active—
that is, they changed the direction of polarized light— while racemic
acid crystals were optically inactive, or neutral. This difference
was a complete enigma to such successful chemists as Mitscherlich
and Biot.

Pasteur carefully studied the crystals of tartaric acid under the
microscope. He found that they were hemihedral in shape; that
their facets or tiny faces were all inclined towards the right; and
that they reflected the beam of light to the right. But what about
the crystals of racemic acid? Here he found the same hemihedral
shape; however, some of the facets of the crystals were inclined
to the right and others to the left. Understanding burst upon him.
Racemic acid crystals were made up of two other tartrates, both
optically active; but one turned the polarized light to the right,
and the other turned it to the left: When the two were present

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282

together they neutralized one another and it was therefore that
racemic acid crystals were optically inactive. This was a great dis-
covery for a young chemist of twenty-six to have made; the thrill of
it was magnificent beyond all imagination.

He checked his results hurriedly, and then took them to the great
Biot, who was enthusiastic. “My boy,” the old savant said with
emotion, “I have so loved science all my life, that this touches my
very heart.” From that moment Biot became Pasteur’s mentor and
protector. Through his efforts the young scientist was elected to the
post of assistant professor of chemistry at Strasbourg.

Strasbourg. Love!

Marie Laurent was the daughter of the rector of the university.
Pasteur met her in January, 1849, when he first arrived; in May
they were married. Pasteur wrote to his friend Chappuis: ''I believe
that I shall be very happy. Every quality I could wish for in a wife,
I find in her.*' For many years she was to bear him children and
hold his meals hot xvhile he stayed hours overtime in his laboratory.
She listened patiently to his excited descriptions of grand vistas
that he saw^ opening before him in this or that experiment; and
she shared the pain and suffering that accompanied seemingly end-
less trials. Marie Laurent Pasteur was made of the same endurance
that characterized Emma Wedgwood Darwin and Jenny von West-
phalen Marx, Extraordinary women of intellectual titans.

When Sir Isaac Newton was asked how he had discovered the
law of gravitation he answered, according to Voltaire: '‘By think-
ing about it ceaselessly/’ Pasteur was the ceaseless, indefatigable
: thinker: ideas led into each other, played tag in his mind. A new
and overpowering thought was beginning to make itself felt. He was
still involved in his tartrates, when the idea occurred to him that
all life was made up of dissymmetry, since these crystals formed
from organic material were dissymmetrical. He felt himself on the
verge of piercing the mystery of the cosmic order. But he main-
tained self-control, realizing that suspended judgment is the great-
est triumph of intellectual discipline. Before broadcasting these
ideas in the guise of “philosophy,” he felt constrained to put them
to the test of experiment. They collapsed utterly. His first step into

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283

the realm of theory was a failure. Yet there remained with him the
discipline of the experience itself which perhaps can best be de-
scribed in words which Thomas Huxley once used with memorable
severity: “The assertion that outstrips the evidence is not only a
blunder but a crime.”

Still one idea had clung to him: the resemblance between the
phenomena of crystals and the phenomena of life. And soon an
experiment encouraged him to go farther along this path. He intro-
duced a certain type of mildew into racemic acid, causing it to
ferment. Soon he saw that only a portion of the acid (the dextro-
racemic) was decomposed by the ferment; apparently it fed solely
upon the right-handed molecules. The other portion (laevo-racemic)
was left intact. Thus he succeeded in establishing a connection
between this particular dissymmetry of crystals and the vital process
of fermentation.

Nobody had ever thought how closely related these processes
were. The theoretical mind, however, has a way of making things
which at first appear diverse hang together. An impending over-
turn of age-old beliefs was soon to take place by reason of the
discovery of this connection between the world of crystals and the
world of micro-organisms. Pasteur knew only too well that it would
be a long-drawn-out battle to prove that fermentation was caused by
living organisms and that decay and putrefaction differed only from
fermentation in that other organisms were at work on other kinds
of nutritive material. The world, of course, now knows that fer-
mentation is a vital process made possible by the action of living
organisms.

The great German chemist of that generation, Justus Liebig,
regarded the phenomenon of fermentation as merely a process set
in motion by the decomposing of the dead yeast cells whose burst-
ing molecules accelerated the decomposition of the fermentable
matter. When Pasteur announced living yeast at work as a cause of
fermentation and of the existence of a special lactic yeast which
caused another kind of fermentation, the great Liebig could do no
more than ridicule these views. Liebig claimed that “the changes
designated by the terms fermentation, decay and putrefaction are
chemical transformations.” The only difference Liebig could see
between fermentation and putrefection was that in the case of

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284

fermentation the gases evolved are without odor while in putre-
faction the gases emitted are of a disagreeable smell— that is, putrid.

To thwart Liebig and finally drive him beaten from the field was
no easy task. Pasteur had behind him the solid scientific work of
Schwann in Germany and Cagniard-Latour in France. Both men,
using crude microscopes, nevertheless had seen that yeast is made
up of little globules that can reproduce themselves. With these
assured facts in mind Pasteur proceeded to separate single living
yeast plants under his own microscope and then to grow pure cul-
tures from the organisms thus separated. Living yeast now acquired
a new champion.

When Pasteur had won his victory he made a special journey
to Liebig’s home to shake the hand of his German colleague and
assure him that the fight had been waged only in the interests of
truth. But the gesture was in vain. Apparently Liebig could not
match the younger man’s magnanimity; it is said that he met Pasteur
very formally in a black frock coat and would not admit defeat.

We have already seen that the idea of fermentation had been for
some time bound up with that of contagious disease. Pasteur rec-
ognized the connection afresh when he made the inevitable com-
parison between the micro-organisms that seemed to cause fermen-
tation and the tiny transmissible micro-organisms that had been
vaguely associated with it ever since Fracastorius toyed with the
idea of infection. The subject of fermentation took on such tran-
scendent importance in his mind that he wrote to his friend
Chappuis: “I am pursuing as best I can these studies on fermen-
tation which are of great interest, connected as they are with the
impenetrable mystery of life and death.”

In 1854, at the age of thirty-two, when Pettenkofer and Munich
were in the throes of cholera, Pasteur became professor and dean
of the newly created faculty of sciences at the University of Lille.
It seemed as if those who gave him this appointment had read
the future, for he encountered at Lille a direct stimulus to the line
of thinking that was slowly unwinding before him. Lille was a
manufacturing city, and not least among its products was wine.
Shortly the new dean was called upon to make his contribution
to the commercial prosperity of. the region.

One of Pasteur’s pupils had spoken to his father enthusiastically

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of the professor's lectures on fermentation; and the father,, a manu-
facturer of alcohol from beetroot juice, decided to go to the new
dean with a dif&culty that had arisen in his business. His alcohol
had turned sour, as had that of many of his competitors that yean.

■ He^ brought samples to Pasteur to examine.

Here was a direct challenge to the young theorist. Here was a
clear-cut need to perform experiments to test those basic ideas on '
. fermentation as a vital process. Pasteur examined under the mia'o-
scope the globules of fermentation, and noticed that under normal
conditions they were round; but when the alcohol soured in lactic
fermentation they became long.

Pasteur filtered the long globules and established the fact that
they were the sole and specific ferment which caused lactic fei'-
mentatioii. He showed also that this ferment would produce the
same product, lactic acid, no matter what the fermentable mate-
rial: grape juice, milk or beetroot juice. He found that either alcohol
or lactic acid might be produced at will from a solution of sugar
and certain other materials, depending on the introduction into
the solution of the ferment of yeast or of lactic acid.

Within a short time after these experiments, Pasteur solved
almost all the fermentation difficulties of the wine industry. He
showed that each disease of wine, which spoils its taste, was due
to a specific ferment, a specific micro-organism, and he conclusively
demonstrated this to the wine manufacturers in a series of incon-
trovertible experiments. Sour wines, *hopy" wines, bitter wines,
flat wines— all these were due to the presence of a foreign ferment
wffiich overcame the yeast and spoiled the wine. And for each of
these diseases the ferment w^as specific and invariable.

To protect wines from this deterioration, Pasteur suggested heat-
ing them to about 60° centigrade, when the normal fermentation
had been completed. This would kill all the foreign organisms and
protect the wine permanently. Instantaneous success w’^as achieved
with this method by manufacturers. This was the first process called
pasteurization. Not hesitating to show their gratitude, the manu-
facturers heaped honors upon Pasteur, medals, ribbons, and
speeches of appreciation. Further approbation and additional recog-

nition came from the vinegar makers,

to whom Pasteur next showed

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286

how to protect their product from butyric fermentation, another
specific disease, caused by a specific micro-organism.

But if the manufacturers to whom millions of francs were saved
by Pasteur’s methods were convinced and grateful, the many scien-
tists whose pet theories had been overthrown were not. They girded
up their loins, sought for flaws in the long list of Pasteur’s achieve-
ments, and hurried to perform experiments of their own to dis-
prove his. For it was one thing to describe bacteria and explain
what they did— quite another to explain whence they came. Chief
of the objections raised against the germ theory was the doctrine
of spontaneous generation (the origin of life out of nothing), that
ancient fallacy which even to this day is not altogether dead.

Until the seventeenth century no one seriously questioned this
belief in the spontaneous origin of life. We have already seen in
the chapter on Darwin how the Italian scientist, Francesco Redi,
blasted this doctrine when he showed that meat covered with a fine
gauze would not develop maggots (because the flies laid their eggs
on the gauze instead of the meat). In spite of Redi’s irrefutable
demonstration the idea of spontaneous generation was widespread.
Toward the middle of the next century it found a vigorous cham-
pion in Needham, an English clergyman, who claimed to have pro-
duced living microbes from putrescible matter by heating it and
burying the vases beneath hot cinders. Voltaire ridiculed Needham,
finding ammunition for his attacks in the experiments of Spallan-
zani. This able Italian thinker declared that Needham had not
sufficiently heated his vases, or that they had been porous enough
to admit micro-organisms. To refute Needham, Spallanzani sealed
his own vases hermetically in boiling water for an hour. Under such
conditions he found that absolutely no micro-organisms whatsoever
were generated (because all germs originally present had been killed
by heat— sterilized!). When confronted with Spallanzani’s experi-
ment the adherents of Needham merely claimed that Spallanzani
had destroyed the creative power of the air inside the vases by
' - : “torture,” that in consequence his experiments were inconclusive.
“ ^ , .And there the matter rested for nearly a century!

1858 by Henri Pouchet, director of the Museum

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§87

I of Natural History at Rouen, who sent a note to the Academy of

1 Sciences at Paris asserting the truth of spontaneous generation, and

j declaring that he was prepared to prove it by vigorous experiment.

I Pouchet’s assertion was, of course, a direct challenge to Pasteur’s

[ theory which he called a ridiculous fiction. If fermentation could

come about spontaneously, then micro-organisms might arise in
spite of pasteurization; moreover, one could not control their spread
I from person to person in causing disease.

I An intense struggle now began between the adherents of Pouchet
i with their doctrine of spontaneous generation and Pasteur who was
f out to convince the world that life as we know it never originates
spontaneously, that minute organisms— bacteria, germs, microbes—
are far more active agents in this world than had ever been guessed;
that breadmaking, cheese making, tobacco curing, tanning, are
carried out by germ action. It was supposed that meat putrefied
and decayed of its own accord and that it somehow produced the
' bacteria in the process. But as a matter of fact, Pasteur claimed
I that the real explanation was just the other way round: that meat
would not putrefy of itself but that it was made to decay by bac-
teria which had got into it.

In the midst of the furore of debate Pasteur went about testing
his case by rigorous experiments. First he drew air through a filter
of cotton wool and found it black with dusts which under the
microscope were seen to be tiny plants or bacteria. He took these
subvisible organisms and planted them in solutions, where they
developed and produced various sorts of fermentation. Next, he
devised an experiment that was conclusive: he took two flasks, one
with a long curved neck, the other with an ordinary open top,
and filled them both with previously boiled putrescible material.
The solution in the ordinary open flask soon began to ferment,
while that in the other (to which everything in the air except the
dusts could penetrate) remained intact. Pasteur triumphantly ex-
claimed: “Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover
from the blow dealt it by this simple experiment.” And indeed
it was a telling blow. Pouchet soon came back with new objections.
If the air is the carrier of these thousands of different kinds of
germs, it would be so thick with them that one could not see, or

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288

else there must be some zones with more, some with less germs,
which appeared to him and to his followers ridiculous.

Pasteur followed up this advantage. He replied that indeed
there are regions varying in the number of germs they bear in
the atnaosphere. While Pouchet ridiculed such an idea, Pasteur
proceeded to prove it by another simple and conclusive experi-
ment. He took sterile putrescible material, filled hundreds of phials
with it, sealing each with a flame to kill all dusts that might pos-
sibly enter. Then he opened these phials in various parts of the
country, each just long enough to let it fill with air, and then sealed
them again. Just as he expected, many of the phials which had
been opened in quiet, dustless cellars, on mountains, in country
fields, did not ferment at all, while those he had opened in city
streets, in gardens, in homes, showed well-advanced stages of fer-
mentation after a short time.

The presence of living particles at various heights in the atmos-
phere is of practical interest to mankind. Since Pasteur’s day scien-
tists have built up a remarkable body of knowledge on the amount
of living and organic matter inhabiting the vast aerial ocean that
envelops our earth. In recent years, aided by aircraft, they have
been able to advance his original ideas. Pasteur studied the living
contents of the air up to a height of only a few thousand feet; he
conceived the idea, though he never executed it, of making spore-
hunting trips in a balloon. Today, “stratosphere” expeditions in-
clude in their equipment apparatus for sampling the air and its
contents at levels far beyond anything that Pasteur thought pos-
sible. The upper limit beyond which no organic matter of any
kind is present has not yet been found.

In spite of Pouchet’s continued opposition, which took the form
of badly carried out experiments, Pasteur decided to turn his atten-
tion to other things. For himself, free from prejudices and pre-
conceived ideas, the question of spontaneous generation was settled.
It was strengthened by John Tyndall’s demonstration that flasks
of sterilized material remained uncontaminated. Pasteur reported
his results to the Academy, and gave a hint of his plans for further
work. “AVhat would be most desirable would be to push these studies
far enough to prepare the road for a serious research into the
origin of various diseaieisi’’

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289

His destiny was becoming clearer with each succeeding discov-
ery. The idea had been growing in his mind that his work was
bringing him slowly to the study of the human pathology; and
indeed, everything he did seemed to point in no other direction.
In 1863 he told Louis Philippe that his ambition was to arrive
“at the knowledge of the causes of contagious and putrid diseases.”
And when he published his views on beer (he had investigated
breweries in England and France and finally come to conclusions
similar to those he had reached in his studies on wine), he called
attention to the unmistakable connection between the diseases pro-
duced in beer by micro-organisms and those infectious diseases
which cause suffering in animals and man.

Now he was ready to attack the idea of disease. Again destiny
seemed to point the way. His old teacher Dumas asked him to
investigate a scourge that had devastated the silkworm industry
of France. This disorder was called “pebrine,” after the word pebre
(pepper), and was characterized by the appearance of little black
and brown spots on the bodies of the diseased worms. These spots
looked like pepper grains. Pebrine had begun to wreak disaster
upon the French silk industry in 1849; by 1861 the revenue had
sunk from one hundred and thirty to eight million francs. All sorts
of foolish remedies were tried in a frantic effort to save the busi-
ness. The diseased worms were dusted and fumigated now with
ashes, charcoal, sulphur, then with chlorine and coal tar. Some people
sprinkled the mulberry leaves with mustard meal, soot, quinine
powders, rum or absinthe. It was all in vain, the plague could not
be stopped.

In answer to Dumas’ request Pasteur began to study the disease
for he wished to substitute facts for phantoms. Naturally he came
to his task better equipped than any previous investigator. He had
a theory! Like Arion, the ancient poet and musician of Lesbos,
Pasteur held a magic instrument in his hands. Because there is
something truly magical about a great theory, the parallel from
mythology is not without its inspiration., Arion, when robbed and
thrown into the sea by Corinthian sailors during a voyage, is said
to have called to his aid by the sweetness of his tones a dolphin,

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290

which took him on its back and carried him to land. In an old
picture which the great medieval anatomist Vesali us prized one sees
the bard, his instrument in his hand, just reaching the island of
rescue. Around the sketch are the words, “Invia virtuti nulla est
via”— “for the man of courage, no way is closed.”

Fortified in his belief that infectious diseases and fermentations
were the result of germs, Pasteur began his research with the point
of view that a specific micro-organism was responsible for the silk-
worm blight. That was in 1865. By the end of the year he firmly
believed he had established the fact that the tiny oval corpuscles
found on the bodies of the silkworms were the cause of pebrine,
and rashly guaranteed that if the silkgrowers would segregate the
healthy silkworm eggs (that is, those free from the corpuscles) the
silkworms would all develop normally. Confident he had solved the
problem, he returned to Paris to prepare his results and await the
final proof that he was right.

In 1867 he went back to the silk district and found a truly dread-
ful state of affairs. Almost all his apparently healthy silkworm eggs
had hatched unhealthy worms. What was more, it seemed that not
even his belief that the corpuscles were the cause of the disease
was justified, for there were none to be found on these sick worms.
He faced the prospect of a great loss of prestige and a severe set-
back to his theory.

But he did not throw up his hands in despair. He went back to
his laboratory— the laudable example of a man who could change
his mind with scrupulous honesty if he thought the evidence war-
ranted it. With the aid of his microscope he examined the stomachs
of this particular batch of diseased worms: he could see no cor-
puscles. But there were other things— hadn’t he seen something
like them before? Actually he found a different micro-organism
than those of the familiar pebrine. Unquestionably here was the
answer— “JZ y a deux maladies” he exclaimed. “There are two dis-
eases!” These newly discovered micro-organisms were similar to the
bacteria he had come across in his studies of butyric fermentation.
They were anaerobic, too— that is, they could not exist in the pres-
ence of oxygen. So there were two diseases: pebrine and flacherie.

strain of keeping up the fight against spontaneous gener-
ation, in analyzing and finding a preventive for the silkworm dis-

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eases together with plans for new experiments and new fields of
investigation, was more than he could carry. In October, 1868,
a high cerebral tension was brought about, and he was stricken
by an attack of paralysis. For several weeks he was not expected
to live. Work on the laboratory which he had persuaded the Em-
peror to build for scientific research was suspended. Fortunately
for the world Pasteur regained his health. He returned to the silk-
worm region to continue his campaign against pebrine and flacherie.
Shortly he conquered both diseases and the silkworm industry was
saved.

Again the germ theory triumphed— and again it was expressed
in understandable terms of francs and sous. Pasteur took a quantity
of healthy seeds to an abandoned silk property of the Emperor’s
where pebrine and flacherie had ruined the industry. In the very
first year, by employing his own scientific methods, Pasteur was
able to pour an unexpected income of 22,000 francs into the impe-
rial coffers.

A great theory is a deep well of truth— not all the water in it
can be drawn up in one bucket. We have already seen how much
knowledge in support of the germ theory Pasteur was able to lift
out of the problems of fermentation, the controversy over spon-
taneous generation, and the conquest of the silkworm blight. More
information was yet to come; this time out of that chamber of
horrors, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Medically speaking the Germans were much better prepared than
the French. Before entering upon the first attack they had care-
fully built a behind-the-lines hospital system which they expected
would cut down their mortality from the scourge of gangrene, sep-
ticaemia, erysipelas and other forms of blood poisoning. Every
preventative known to official science of that day was provided
for. Their chief surgeons, Stromeyer and Nussbaum, succeeded in
many of their objectives but they failed miserably in one: they per-
formed seventy amputations through the knee without a single
success. And of course the French Army, totally unprepared in
affairs of this kind, was in a much worse condition. Out of thir-
teen thousand amputations— legs, fingers, toes, arms— ten thousand

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

patients died. No commentary on inadequate medical methods could
be more telling than this.

Yet practically all this horrible mortality might have been pre-
vented. There was a young English surgeon, Joseph Lister, who
had published at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian hostilities
a description of his new method of antiseptic surgery and its applica-
bility to the war. If Lister’s advice had been heeded, perhaps nine-
tenths of those who perished might have been saved. Indeed, after
the close of the war, Nussbaum sent an assistant to Edinburgh to
learn the Listerian method. With the knowledge brought back the
German surgeon was able to reduce gangrene mortality in his hos-
pital from eighty percent to nothing.

Joseph Lister was thirty-seven years old when in 1865 he had
read Pasteur’s paper on lactic fermentation. For several years pre-
vious to this he had emphasized the need of cleanliness in healing
wounds: it was his opinion that cleaning the wound itself was
suflScient to prevent infection. Pasteur’s revelation that the air
was full of bacteria had shown him the serious limitation of his
technique. To clean the wound was not enough; everything that
came in contact with it must also be disinfected and freed from
bacteria. So Lister devised the Listerian method of antisepsis. This
meant that the hands of the surgeon and his assistants, all instru-
ments and sponges, and all dressings must be sterilized with car-
bolic acid. Lister even went so far as to keep a spray of carbolic
constantly about the point of an operation to purify the air. With
hospital infection thus understood, millions of lives no longer
needed to be sacrificed.

In 1874, almost at the outset of his own campaign against disease,
Pasteur received a letter from Lister. The note described the anti-
septic method and related its success. To Pasteur, who just one year
before had been elected to the Academy of Medicine, this unex-
pected message was a source of great encouragement. Now he could
face the doctors of the Academy who were his colleagues, but
who nevertheless resented the intrusion of a chemist into their
esoteric circle and considered the germ theory little more than
the vaporings of an upstart.

So utterly reactionary were the views of official medicine that even
in the face of Lister’s triumphs with the antiseptic method, not

PASTEUR

to speak of Pasteur’s victory over the silkworm diseases, the physi-
cians were still unwilling to give the new theories a tolerant hearing.

Typical of the opposition was a speech by Doctor Chassaignac, a
prominent surgeon, who at the first meeting after Pasteur’s
admission to the Academy of Medicine bitterly denounced Doctor
Davaine, who had speculated on the connection between the dis-
ease of anthrax and the bacteria he had found in the blood of
animals who had died of it. Chassaignac, while Pasteur listened,
attacked Davaine and ridiculed the entire germ theory, calling it
“laboratory surgery, which has destroyed very many animals and
saved very few human beings.”

Several other members of the Academy spoke, most of them
expressing their opinion that hospital miasma (a vague term used
to denote all hospital epidemic infections) was due to faulty venti-
lation of wards and that bacteria were the result and not the cause
of disease. Then the president called on the new member to give
his opinions on the matter.

Pasteur, the “mere chemist,” rose and stood before that hard-
headed group of doctors, some openly sneering, others regarding
him with amused tolerance. With emphasis and vigor he spoke for
the germ theory of disease, deplored the shortsightedness of those
who could not see its truth, reasserted his observation that the
correlation between certain diseases and certain micro-organisms
was absolutely indisputable. He told those complacent doctors that
they themselves often carried the dread hospital infections from
one patient to another, and that if they wanted to avoid contagion
they must take care to disinfect their instruments and hands.

Of course they were not pleased to hear these things— especially
the older men. A group of young men, however, undergraduates in
medicine, listened. Turning to these students Pasteur said; “Young
men, you who sit on these benches, and who are perhaps the hope
of the medical future of the country, do not come here to seek
the excitment of polemics, but come and learn method.”

11 .■

Davaine, as we have seen, had speculated on the connection be-
tween anthrax, that horrible disease , to which cattle and even men
fell victim, and the tiny rodlike bacteria he had seen in the blood

TmCHITECTS OF IDEAS

294

of those dead of the disease. Pasteur was not content merely to
speculate. He threw himself with earnestness into the study of
anthrax which was literally ruining the cattle industry. In some
flocks twenty sheep or more died out of every hundred.

Davaine had inoculated rabbits with the anthrax blood and they
had accordingly died of the disease, showing in their blood the same
bacteria he had noticed in the original specimens. But two other
investigators had performed the same experiment, and had found
no such bacteria in their rabbits after death. Davaine claimed that
they had inoculated diseases other than anthrax.

From Germany came the report of Robert Koch, who, working
alone in a small country village, had managed to cultivate the
bacilli of anthrax in a pure culture. These pure cultures, when
inoculated into animals, produced the disease as expected, each
case showing the bacteria. This seemed to clinch the case for the
germ theory. However, there came the announcement by the scien-
tist Paul Bert that when he had inoculated anthrax blood, in which
the bacilli had previously been killed by compressed oxygen, never-
theless he had been able to produce anthrax in his animals— that is,
the bacilli were present. How explain that?

It was Koch who discovered the reason for Paul Bert’s failure
to kill the anthrax bacteria. Studying the development of this germ,
Koch observed the formation of spores, tiny rounded bodies with
thick protective walls which could undergo great changes of tem-
perature and of environment without dying. Like the seeds of
plants they could revive and grow. Obviously the anthrax spores
had withstood Bert’s compressed oxygen and had upon inoculation
grown and produced the disease. The spore was to blame!

Pasteur tried to convince his colleagues at the Academy that
this was the true explanation. Nothing seems to us, removed in
time, more absurd than the opposition which persisted in block-
ing his path. Among his adversaries there was a professor of medi-
cine, Doctor Colin, who seems to have possessed a positive genius
for contradiction. It is hard to account for Colin’s attitude other
than on the score of jealousy, stubbornness or stupidity. Through-
out the entire period during which Pasteur was solving the prob-
lem presented by anthrax Colin argued, bullied, contradicted every
step of Pasteur’s advance;

PASTEUR 295

And now that he had established the bacillus as the sole cause
of the disease, how was he to cure it? This appeared to be an
insoluble problem; so Pasteur decided to take the easier way and
tried to see what could be done by means of prevention. He learned
that cattle which had died of anthrax were buried all together,
and that cattlemen had not taken the trouble to choose a spot
where healthy sheep could not graze. Pasteur inspected the ground
over one of these graves and found it alive with anthrax spores!
This then was the mode of transmission. Healthy animals would
come and eat the grass growing over these graves and take in the
spores which would produce the disease. This being the case, pre-
vention appeared simple: merely be careful to bury the animals in
barren ground, where no grazing would be permitted.

But this complicated and inconvenient process was rendered
unnecessary by a tremendous discovery that Pasteur stumbled upon.
He had been working to discover the micro-organism that causes
chicken cholera, the disease that swept the feathered inhabitants of
the barnyard exactly as the Black Plague swept the great cities.
He had already succeeded both in isolating it and growing it in
successive cultures just as he had done with the anthrax bacillus.
Coming back to his laboratory, after some weeks’ absence, he found
several old cultures of the cholera germ and tried inoculating it
into some hens. As he expected, they had a slight attack and then
recovered (the culture having been weakened by its long exposure
to oxygen). Next he tried to inoculate these same hens with ordi-
nary virulent cultures; he then dismissed them from his mind,
thinking they would be dead the next day. Imagine his surprise
and tremendous interest when he found them the next day and the
following day and many days thereafter in perfect health.

He had rediscovered vaccination!

Almost a hundred years before Pasteur made this rediscovery a
young Englishman, Edward Jenner, had found out in 1798 that if
the disease of cows known as cowpox were inoculated into humans,
they were thenceforth free from smallpox. After discovering this
interesting fact Jenner was at a loss to understand just why vac-
cination gave immunity. Pasteur, hoiyeyer, on rediscovering the

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296

same phenomenon understood that a slight attack of the disease
conferred immunity— that is, he could produce a weak or attenu-
ated serum (culture) of a germ and that inoculation with this serum
would make the animal immune to the more virulent form of the
microbe. Jenner had found a fact but it took Pasteur to discover
its underlying scientific principle: namely, if a living being were
already stricken with a virulent germ disease, inoculation with the
attenuated culture of the germ would afford resistance to the dis-
ease and in a large percentage of cases effect a cure. From this
understanding has come protection for human beings against in-
numerable maladies.

Pasteur now hastened to test the value of this new discovery in
the case of anthrax. He met a little difficulty here; it was not so
simple to weaken these bacilli as it was those of chicken cholera,
because spores formed so quickly. But he found that the spores
did not form at a temperature of 42° centigrade. By keeping his
cultures at this temperature, he found that he was able to attenuate
them to any degree he wished. This done, he proceeded to test
the value of his protective vaccine upon laboratory animals. It
worked to perfection. With tremendous enthusiasm he announced
the discovery on February 28, 1881.

Overnight the whole country became interested in this work.
His opponents, however, still ridiculed him. “The microbe alone
is pure,” said one leering critic, “and Pasteur is its prophet.” Of
the many who expressed doubt and distrust, Rossignol, an editor
of the Veterinary Press, was the most outspoken. He called for a
public trial directly challenging Pasteur and his anthrax vaccine.
He doubted that Pasteur would consent.

Against the advice of friends who feared the risk of a public
trial Pasteur accepted, announcing at the same time a complete
and ambitious program of vaccination that would definitely prove
his case. At the farm of Pouilly le Fort, where the trials were to
be held, fifty sheep were to undergo experimentation. Twenty-five
were to be vaccinated; twenty-five others would not be vaccinated.
These fifty would then be inoculated with virulent cultures. “The
twenty-five vaccinated sheep will survive,” declared Pasteur, “the
twenty-five unvaccinated will all perish.”

" On May 5, 1881, the day o first trials, a great crowd of

PASTEUR

297

veterinaries, physicians, cattlemen, farmers, apothecaries and savants
was present to witness the first vaccinations. At the last moment
tw'o goats were substituted for two of the not-to-be-vaccinated sheep,
and an ox for one of the to-be-vaccinated sheep. Assisted by his
three associates, Chamberland, Roux and Thuillier, Pasteur in-
jected his vaccine into the right thighs of the chosen animals. The
ox and goats w?ere marked on the right horn, and the sheep on
the ear, to distinguish them from their unvaccinated comrades. The
company then adjourned to the large hall of the farm, where Pas-
teur lectured on his researches. Interest was aroused but skepticism
was still rampant. On May 17 a second inoculation of the vacci-
nated sheep was made, with a stronger virus. The day for the
inoculation of the virulent, deadly culture into both groups of
sheep was set for May 31.

Doctor Colin was still muttering against Pasteur, unprepared to
yield an inch in his immovable attitude. On his way to the final
trial, he took pains to caution a friend against the germ theory and
its propounder. He instructed his friend to shake the phials of virus
just before they were to be injected, because Pasteur was planning
to trick them by inoculating the un vaccinated group with culture
taken from the bottom of the phial, where the bacteria had settled,
while the vaccinated group would be inoculated with the innocuous
surface layer. His friend promised to comply with these instructions.

On May 3 1 Pasteur was cool and confident. When Colin’s friend
asked to shake the phials, Pasteur assented; when asked that a larger
dose be given than had been planned, he willingly complied.
Another veterinary asked that the injections be made alternately
between the two groups. To this and all other requests Pasteur and
his assistants agreed; they shot their vaccines into the fifty animals
with firmness and assurance, and then asked that everyone return
June 2 to see the results.

Pasteur’s amazing confidence profoundly impressed the spectators;
his opponents began to wonder whether after all they had not been
wrong to sneer. Frankly, they were disturbed by such an exhibition
of cool assurance.

Pasteur returned to Paris to await the fateful day. Had he not
been overrash, he asked himself, in rushing madly into a public test
of his vaccine before he had taken tiine to perfect it? Perhaps the

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298

introduction of the oxen and the goats might spoil his success;
he had never tried his vaccine upon these animals. Or perhaps
Chamberland, Roux and Thuillier, to whom he had entrusted the
business of seeing that the right cultures were used in the right
cases, had made a mistake? He tormented himself with these ques-
tions and found it difficult to concentrate on the new work he was
undertaking in his laboratory, the investigation of hydrophobia.
If he failed in this, his scientific prestige would be tremendously
damaged. He knew only too well how opponents magnify one’s
failures and forget the successes.

On June 2 Pasteur arrived a little late. He noticed that some boys
in the streets looked at him curiously as he hurried to the barn
where the experiment had been conducted. Did they already know
that a horrible disappointment awaited him? He hurried as fast
as his paralyzed body would allow.

When he entered the bam, his fears were instantly dispelled; a
loud shout of applause greeted him. He looked about eagerly.
Everything was as he had predicted. Twenty-two of the unvacci-
nated sheep were already dead, their carcasses distended, blood
oozing from their mouths. The other animals were in the last stages
of anthrax, gasping for breath, trembling in every limb, wheezing
piteously through their gory mouths.

The vaccinated animals were all in perfect health.

Colin was not present.

The experiment at Pouilly le Fort was the top of the hill for
Pasteur; from that time on success was assured. A new school of
scientists, open-minded enough to take advantage of his trail-blaz-
ing, gladly joined in paying homage to the man who had grown
with his theory and had used it for the benefit of mankind.

In 1882, Pasteur was elected to the French Academy, the highest
honor of his country. Alexandre Dumas, the novelist, expressed
the feeling of France when he called on Pasteur and thanked him
“for consenting to become one of us.”

Upon his admission to the French Academy the debate over spon-
taneous generation was revived. In the Academy of Medicine, too,
the old die-hards were still upholding the ancient fallacy. They

PASTEUR

299

continued to feel that much in medicine was endangered by the
views of Pasteur. After all, for centuries all contagion of the flesh
was charged to spontaneous generation within the body just as
bread fermentation was credited to spontaneous power within the
wheat kernel. Their leader. Doctor Pidoux, maintained that “dis-
ease is in us, of us, by us,” and refused to concede that even small-
pox was contagious and inoculable, in spite of the fact that suc-
cessful vaccination had been going on since Jenner’s discovery.
Koch had discovered the bacillus of tuberculosis, establishing that
micro-organism as the sole responsibility for the dread white plague.
And still these stubborn men of medicine refused to see; they pre-
ferred the old-fashioned belief in the spontaneity of disease. They
insisted a malady sprang up of itself, spontaneously generated, com-
pelled by no outside agency. A body became ill because it was so
constituted, not because of anything such as infection.

Pasteur was visibly disgusted with their intolerance and ob-
stinacy. He made fewer and fewer visits to the meetings of the
Academy of Medicine, giving more time to the Academy of Sciences.
Besides, he was on the track of his last great discovery, the final
and completing step necessary to establish the germ theory as vital
and important truth. He was attacking the problem of hydrophobia.

Hydrophobia is a disease contracted by infection from the bite of
a dog suffering from rabies. The disease, if unchecked, is almost
invariably fatal. For centuries people knew only one way to help
the victim of a mad dog’s bite and that was to cauterize the wound
at once: a redhot iron seared its way into the tortured flesh. This
done, the unfortunate person could do nothing but wait. Perhaps
the disease had been checked by the cauterization. If it had, there
was occasion for rejoicing. But if it had not— and often it failed—
there was nothing to do. The virus multiplied itself in the blood
stream of its victim, while he went about his daily tasks, a doomed
man. Then one day— it might be two or three weeks, it might be
four months— the virus would reach the spinal cord, it would eat
its way to the base of the brain, and the horrible symptoms of
hydrophobia would show themselves— frothing at the mouth, rav-
ing, delirium, fierce thirst, until at last, death released the sufferer.

When Pasteur began his investigation of hydrophobia all he

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

had was his theory. He suspected a microbe, but of its course and
behavior he had no notion.

On October 26, 1885, he read to the Academy of Sciences “A
Method of Preventing Rabies After a Bite.” The greatest fruit of
the germ theory now belonged to all humanity.

Nor was the world backward about taking advantage of it. Pa-
tients began to arrive from every part of the country to undergo
his treatments. The workers at the laboratory were constantly busy
preparing cultures and giving inoculations. Physicians came to study
the new therapy for hydrophobia.

Recognition, full and unmitigated, was now his. A subscription
was opened to establish the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Two and a
half million francs were subscribed. Work began at once. The
architect refused to take a fee; the builders themselves would accept
only expenses. On November 14, 1888, the Institute was opened.

It is doubtful whether in the whole history of mankind a scien-
tist and a theorist had ever before been honored with such spon-
taneous good will. It is indeed doubtful whether any man in any
station ever received such an outpouring of appreciation and high
regard. Even the medical profession, which had been so resentful
that a “mere chemist” should show it how to do its job, offered
its homage. The antiseptic method came to be adopted by surgeons
everywhere; hospital mortality now shrank from fifty to five per
hundred. Maternity hospitals, benefiting by his recommendations
in regard to sanitation and infection, greatly reduced their death
rate. In the face of such incontrovertible evidences even the old
antagonists who had attempted to obscure his reputation could no
longer withhold tribute.

All in all it was a grand triumph of personal faith— of methods,
character, perseverance. His life had been indeed a singularly out-
standing series of logical and consistent discoveries whose principal
lines of attack merged one into another. Who would ever have
thought that the germ theory would get its start as a result of
tartaric acid experiments, that this would lead into discoveries in
the field of fermentation and that out of this would come the con-
troversy over spontaneous generation; that the settlement of this
knotty problem would open the gate for victory over animal dis-
eases which in turn would supply the key to the mystery of those
contagious : woes which have tormented the flesh of man? At the

PASTEUR

celebration of Pasteur’s seventieth birthday Joseph Lister journeyed
from England to tell him: “You have lifted the veil which had
covered infectious diseases during the centuries; you have discov-
ered and demonstrated their microbial nature.”

It not only demanded unparalleled toil to do this, but it took
a strong inner faith in one’s self to withstand scorn. Yes, all his
life he had been a man of faith: to be sure not the kind of faith
that willingly believes in spite of evidence, but the faith that pur-
sues truth in scorn of consequence.

The French Government, which in 1874 had awarded him a
recompense in the form of an annuity of 13,000 francs, now raised
that sum to 35,000 francs, which was to revert to his widow and
then to his children. The gratitude of the world poured in upon
him. What a difference between Galileo with his telescope and
Pasteur with the microscope: it took fully two hundred years for
the Italian scientist’s ideas to be vindicated. In his own lifetime
Pasteur fought a winning battle. He was a well-satisfied man.

But his time was nearly up; his health was bad; he could no
longer undertake new experiments. Yet he knew that the net results
of his discoveries would swell into the greatest benefit ever con-
ferred by one man upon his fellows; that they would lead to
remarkable antitoxins, widespread immunity, as well as to unfore-
seen triumphs of surgery. Actually, more than forty contagious
diseases are today curable as a direct result of the methods he
discovered. Pasteur lived to see his pupils Pierre Roux and Alexan-
dre Yersin conquer diphtheria by means of antitoxin. He had the
satisfaction of knowing that younger scientists all over the world
were applying his theory and conquering new fields with it.

On October 33, 1894, a paralysis attack sent him to his bed;
there he remained to the end of the year. In January he regained
a little strength. Roux had arranged all his old instruments, test
tubes, cultures, in a little museum, and the sick man was taken
to see them. For the last time he gazed upon his laboratory, the
scene of a lifetime of work. Then they took him back to bed.

Toward the fall of 1895 his strength began to go from him. Late
in September he had another stroke, and for twienty-four hours
remained almost entirely paralysed.

On Saturday afternoon, September 38, 1895, Louis Pasteur died
peacefully.

Freud . . . theory of the mind

12 .

IN 1884 there was a young assistant physician at the General
Hospital in Vienna who was studying anaesthetic properties of
the drug cocaine. He wrote a preliminary report on it, and made
the note that it benumbed the tongue and palate after a solution
had been swallowed. He added the suggestion, “We may presume
that this anesthetizing action of cocaine could be utilized in various
ways.”

Before the young physician, Sigmund Freud, could continue his
investigation along this line, he had an opportunity to visit his
fiancee, whom he had not seen for two years. So he put aside his
research for the time being.

His report, however, was read by Roller, a young Viennese stu-
dent, who told a friend, “I gather from what Freud writes that it
ma y be possible to anesthetize the eye with a solution of cocaine.”
These two young men went ahead with experiments, and later in
the year the Ophthalmological Congress at Heidelberg listened to
a paper by Roller upon the new use of the drug. In one bold stroke
Roller achieved for himself a position in medicine’s hall of fame
—he had solved one of surgery’s most vexing problems.

If Sigmund Freud had not neglected the opportunity that Roller
grasped, perhaps he would never have gone on to make the incon-
ceivably greater discoveries of psychoanalysis. But it is useless to
speculate on what might have been. What actually happened we all
know; Freud changed his intellectual domicile; he moved into an-
other field to revolutionize human thought, and to bring to light
an important theory touching the mysteries of the human mind.

Freud was twenty-eight years old when Roller made the dis-
covery which he himself might have achieved. Born of Jewish par-
,ents in what is now Czechoslovakia, he had been brought to Vienna
at the age of four. In this center of European culture Freud grew
up and was educated. Here too he first experienced that antagonism

FREUD 303

against the Jew which early forced him to be self-reliant, inde-
pendent, and unconcerned with the opinions of others.

At the Gymnasium, where he excelled so conspicuously that he
was rarely required to take an examination, young Freud managed
to stand at the top of his class for a period of seven years. He was
an uncommon student, sensitive to the vast ranges of knowledge
and already giving evidence of a deep and acute power of analysis.
At first his career had been a matter for doubt. But he was inter-
ested in life and human beings. Medicine seemed to be an obvious
course of study for such a young man.

The theories of Darwin were creating at that time a great stir
in Europe. To young Freud they brought both inspiration and
enthusiasm. He began to share the hope that man’s knowledge
of the natural world, already so greatly expanded by Darwin, might
be still further advanced in new and unexplored fields. He felt that
he himself would like to be an instrument in these discoveries.

What finally led him to study medicine was an essay by Goethe
which had been read aloud at a lecture just before he left school.
In this essay Goethe rhapsodized about nature, describing her tre-
mendous variety, her infinite abundance, and her consummate
mysteries. Young Freud was deeply moved. The poet had spoken
to his heart. There now seemed to be only one path that he could
take in order to approach closer to these profound beauties, only
one path compatible with his economic circumstances. Then and
there he decided to study medicine.

But the choice made in a moment of enthusiasm did not prove
all he hoped for. In the first place, he encountered at the University
of Vienna a strong current of anti-Semitism which deeply disturbed
him; then there was the orthodox medical teaching, cut and dried,
heavy with the weight of superstitions and points of view accumu-
lated over the centuries. Would all this prove an effective barrier
to his eagerness in penetrating the secrets of nature?

Apart from psychology, the various medical sciences had little
or no attraction for him, and the entrance to even this tremendously
interesting field was cluttered up with futile theories and prejudices
that obscured the pathways. He began to realize that his talents
were peculiar ones, and his limitations, stringent. He seemed unable

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304

to fit in anywhere, and his enthusiasm dropped for a while— noth-
ing appeared to him either worthy of, or capable of improvement
by, his attention. As a result his medical studies languished, and
it was not until 1881 that he took his degree.

In the meantime he had found at least temporary contentment
in experimental work in the physiological laboratory of Ernst
Briicke. Here he began to delve into the mysterious workings of the
nervous system, spending long hours dissecting the nerves of rare
fishes and acquiring a firm grip on the physical basis of nervous
phenomena.

But his theoretical pursuits were far from earning him a liveli-
hood. Briicke advised him to leave the laboratory and seek the
more remunerative work of interne in the General Hospital. There
he retained his passion for research, and he was able to transfer
his attentions from the nervous apparatus of fishes to that of human
beings. Consequently in 1883 he became an active worker in the
Institute of Cerebral Anatomy while continuing his employment
as a junior physician at the General Hospital. It was now apparent
that he was drawing closer to his own real interests: he was laying
the groundwork in physical research into the constitution of the
nervous system for the nonphysical (psychical) theory he was one
day to elaborate.

Now more than ever he plunged deeper into the study of nerv-
ous diseases, especially organic ones that sprang from injuries and
malformations and constitutional failings of the physical bases of
the mind. But here again he met with discouragement. There was
virtually no treatment for such diseases; one was forced to be one’s
own teacher. Psychiatry, the division of medicine treating nervous
disorders, enjoyed little prestige at that time, although through-
out Europe there was growing an awakening realization of the
necessity for closer and more scientific study of the mind, both in
its normal and abnormal manifestations.

Freud achieved in 1885 the distinction of being appointed lec-
turer in neuropathology and, with Briicke’s recommendation, re-
ceived a traveling fellowship of considerable value whereby he
might go to other countries to ground himself better in the material
with which his lectures were to concern themselves.

It was with this fellowship that the door was opened to Freud

FREUD

to' make the first great step in the intellectual adventure .of the
theory that was to be his life's work. ■ ■■

In Paris (where he elected to pursue his studies under the fel-
lowship) the medical savant Jean Martin Charcot was working on
hysteria in his clinic at the College of the Sorbonne. ' His ■ success
and novel experimental methods had spread his fame all over
Europe, for Charcot's study of hysteria had been conducted largely
with the aid of hypnotism, through which he had found himself
capable of producing paralyses and local symptoms in patients by
mere suggestion.

Hysteria is nowadays universally recognized as a psychic disorder;
but before Charcot had demonstrated this, there were all manner
of opinions of its origin, ranging from the “bad blood” idea to
the “devils” Christ cast out of the woman as described in the New
Testament. It usually manifested itself by paralysis, semi-trances,
cataleptic attitudes, and similar random and apparently inexplicable
symptoms.

Charcot claimed, and demonstrated with his experiments in hyp-
nosis, that hysteria was not a product of the tissues of the body but
of the mind: a condition imposed upon the body by the mind.
He went no farther than this; he was content, for the rest, to cata-
logue what he considered the major stages of hysterical attacks (a
division since his time discarded, since there is no regularity in
hysteria) and to prove that these attacks were genuine disorders,
not malingering or shamming.

To Charcot’s clinic came Freud, with his mind beginning to
expand to the possibilities of the study of the neuroses as distin-
guished from the purely physical nervous disorders with which he
had hitherto busied himself. His skill in the diagnosis of organic
nervous disorders had become remarkable, and had gained him
some reputation. He himself felt, however, that this skill was utterly
useless in dealing with the vast field of neurosis— that disorder of
the mind that is solely of the mind and without apparent reflex
in the body. In Charcot's clinic he hoped to find this deeper under-
standing. ' ■

He did not find it; but something more important happened.

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306

Studying under Charcot the numerous cases of hysteria that came
to the clinic, Freud perceived that, in those cases where the symp-
toms consisted of paralysis and loss of feeling in localized regions
of the body, these regions were bounded not by the actual anatom-
ical boundaries, but by those supposed to be the boundaries in
popular belief. Thus a patient complaining of an oppression and
anesthesia in the heart would have this numbness not in the actual
cardiac region known to doctors, but in the place erroneously sup-
posed to be occupied by the heart in the common conception. This
obviously was a clue to the psychic origin of the disorder.

Freud told of his observation to Charcot, who agreed with him,
but was obviously not interested in penetrating any farther into
the psychology of the neuroses. Charcot was circumscribed by the
physical and anatomical fundamentals of his education; he could
summon neither interest nor belief in anything beyond or outside
of these. Freud realized that if there was anything to be learned
it was for himself alone to investigate.

Once, in Freud’s presence, Charcot threw out a hint of some-
thing for which Freud’s mind was not yet ripe. At that time it was
merely a small suggestion; years later it was to recur to him with
special significance. It came about in this way. In describing to
another physician the case of a neurotic couple, the wife an invalid
and the husband impotent, Charcot had suggested that in such cases
it was always sexuality that was at the root of the disorder. Freud,
hearing him, wondered idly: “If he thinks so, why doesn’t he ever
say so?” But Charcot, following the French medical tradition,
shunned the idea of sexuality as a cause of disease. To the bold and
untrammeled mind of Freud this kind of restraint seemed contrary
to the best interests of science. Had he then known more about his
theory-to-be, he would not have allowed the hint to be dropped.
But Freud was only in the making in those days and the inci-
dent was soon forgotten.

But if Charcot drew back from going along with Freud on this
newer road, he nevertheless gave the young man by his own example
a fine code of patience, restraint and imagination that was to aid
him considerably in achieving the outlook and equipment of a
theorist. Charcot, as Freud himself has pointed out, was a seer, a
man who looked at things over and over again, intensifying his

Ppiiilllii

fe. ■

i|,,y:|i|i

FREUD ;50'7

impression of them, until suddenly understanding would come
to Mm. He possessed also the capacity for grouping his observations
in a well-knit system so that order emerged from chaos. All this
was excellent training for Freud,

From the autumn of 1885 to the summer of 1886, Freud studied'
at Charcot’s. On his way back to Vienna he stopped at Berlin and
worked for a few months in the children’s clinic of Max Kassowitz,
where , he made extensive observations of the mental and nervous
disorders of childhood. On his return to Vienna in the fall he mar-
ried the girl who had been waiting for him. This new responsibility,
added to an ever-pressing economic necessity, settled him down to
the job of making a living and a career as a practicing physician.

It was his duty to report on what he had learned abroad to the
Society of Medicine in Vienna. In all good faith he prepared to
do so. He told them of Charcot’s proofs that certain physical mani-
festations of hysteria are not necessarily physical in origin, but
may be mental, since they could be induced by a mental influence,
namely hypnosis. Charcot’s experiments with hypnosis showed that
it was possible by suggestion to produce an hysterical symptom
in the male quite as intense as in the female. Freud told them
all this in clear and scientific language. And they laughed and
scoffed at him.

Of course, it must be understood that in those early days in
Vienna, psychology, which is now the science of mind^ was almost
identical with the science of the brain and the nerves. That is, the
human mind was looked upon as a machine and consequently all
discussion turned upon such things as the structure of the lobes
and the divisions of the brain. In those days to know the mind
meant an understanding of the physical side, a study of the nerves
in their various outbranchings and ramifications. It necessarily
followed from this that the physician’s duty was to treat the various
ailments of the mind only by material or chemical means.

In view of these beliefs it was only natural that his Viennese col-
leagues should smile in disdain when Freud said that Charcot had
definitely proved that certain physical manifestations of hysteria
are not necessarily physical in origin but may be mental. It was

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308

only natural too that they should laugh outright when he went
on to say that many physical diseases are the product of thought.

It was Freud’s first direct encounter with the reactionary forces
of orthodox medicine. For a while it stunned him; but when he
recovered it filled him with the self-same disgust that overwhelmed
Pasteur when his germ theory had been laughed out of court. Freud
heard one doctor dismiss the story of male hysterics with the remark:
“But how can there be male hysterics? Hysteron means the uterus”
—thus placidly retreating to the stage of medical knowledge cur-
rent in Greece some three thousand years before!

After the meeting a number of physicians went up to Freud and
urged him to forget these fantastic fairy tales he had been deceived
into believing. He was a young, earnest medical man; there was
no reason for him to go in for this sort of nonsense. He had a
career to make.

In the middle of his protestations that every word of his report
had been true and verifiable, Freud quickly realized the futility
of his arguing. These men would not believe; they did not mean
to believe. Within him there began to crystallize a strong contempt
for orthodox opinion that stood him in great stead many times in
the next few decades.

He did not give up. He sought out cases of male hysteria in the
clinics of Vienna, and after much opposition on the part of the
physicians in charge, who did not want him to study their patients,
he managed to bring one to the Medical Society for demonstration.
This time he could not be laughed down; but, though the doctors
applauded, they straightway dismissed the matter from their minds.
Freud, however, had been marked with the stamp of the heterodox,
the radical. He was excluded from the Institute of Cerebral
Anatomy.

Not all the medical men of Vienna turned their backs on Freud.
Besides those who were merely forbearing there were a fexv who
realized that this young man had an active, penetrating mind, was
a cool observer and a sharp reasoner. Most important of these to
Freud was the well-established family physician. Doctor Josef
Breuer.

Breuer had been Freud’s good friend before he went to Paris,

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309

' and had told him of his own experiences in the treatment of neu-
rotics and hysterics. There had been one case in particular that
! had seemed to give a clue to the mystery of the origin of hysteria;

j and now that he had definitely turned his mind in this new direc-

; tion, Freud began to study this case afresh.

I The patient had been a girl suffering from hysteria. Her symp-
; toms were temporary but recurrent paralyses, disorders of speech,
i sleepwalking tendencies. Breuer had used hypnosis and had asked
her for her reminiscences, seeking to get deeper into the origins
i of the trouble. Each of her symptoms, he learned, had a point of
beginning, a place where it had first appeared. As soon as he had
traced the symptom back to this point by hypnotic questions, it
had vanished. In this way he was able to eliminate most of her
trouble.

This seemed to be getting somewhere. Breuer called the process
catharsis, or the cleaning out of disorder. He believed that the cure
was effected by suggestion, which served to bring back to a normal
path the energy which had been diverted into a symptom. Freud
was enthusiastic. He began to use Breuer’s technique on his own
patients, and the two men worked together in their effort to arrive
at a clearer understanding of these mysteries.

Freud had found himself almost helpless as far as treating nervous
cases was concerned; Breuer’s method, however, seemed to open up
a vista of possibilities. The therapy of the day in neurotic dis-
orders consisted in electric treatments, which Freud realized were
virtually worthless, since their efficacy, if any, was due to suggestion
by the physician. There was also the water cure, which poor Dar-
win had been subjected to, but Freud saw he could neither make
a living nor benefit his patients by sending them out of town to
a hydropathic establishment after one consultation. It was thus that
catharsis turned out to be a welcome new method.

Breuer had let his discovery go for several years after the first
case. Freud wondered why. He also wondered why Breuer had never
told him the ultimate outcome of the case— whether the patient had
been permanently and completely cured or whether she had re-
lapsed after a while, as had happened with earlier attempts at
hypnotic treatment. But he did not pause overlong in wonder. He
began intensive work with Breuer in the new method, and was

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glO

rewarded with remarkable results. They decided to write a book.

Before its publication Freud left Vienna again for a visit to
France. This time he went to Nancy where the neurologist Bern-
heim was doing remarkable things, so it was said, with hypnotism.
Freud, whose hypnotic abilities were by no means perfect, thought
that this was a good opportunity to perfect them, and besides it
was a splendid chance to gather new material to supplement the
mqss of observations and half-drawn conclusions stirring in his mind.

In Nancy he witnessed interesting things. Bernheim believed that
all the virtue of hypnotism rested in suggestion, and with this point
of view he had made some remarkable cures and some even more
notable experiments.

There was one experiment in particular that impressed Freud
greatly, shedding as it did a new light upon the mass of material
slowly taking form in his own mind. Bernheim would tell a man
in an hypnotic state to perform some trivial act— open an umbrella,
for instance— after he awakened, that is, about five minutes later.
The subject would awaken, would act normally for a short period,
and then would inevitably go to the umbrella and open it.

This, although interesting, was nothing new. What was astound-
ing was that, when the subject was questioned as to why he had
opened the umbrella, he was embarrassed, evaded the question.
Nor was it because he was consciously ashamed of his reason for
doing so: he had thoroughly submerged the origin of his act, and
could not answer the question.

Bernheim went farther. Without resorting to hypnosis, he would
bring the origin of the act back into the subject’s mind. With sug-
gestion, reiterated persuasion, the subject would be induced gradu-
ally to recall all the incidents of the hypnotic trance. The embar-
rassment was thereby removed and the necessity for evasiveness
eliminated.

Freud pondered a great deal on this and other experiments of
Bernheim. They seemed to tie themselves up with the experiences
he had had with Breuer, when forgotten origins of symptoms had
been brought to the foreground of the mind by the method of
catharsis under hypnotism. There seemed to be a mental mechan-

FREUD

ism that existed to repress certain ideas; and from his experience
Freud knew that these ideas were usually unpleasant ones. Nor
was this repression a conscious thing; it would have had no value
if it had been. It seemed to be an automatic, unconscious process
that kept from the patient’s awareness unpleasant or shocking
associations.

But Bernheim’s technique did not fulfill its promise. A highly
gifted neurotic patient, whom Freud had brought with him from
Vienna, was subjected to Bernheim’s concededly superior hypnotic
powers. Freud, who had been able to aid her only temporarily
through hypnosis, had supposed that the difficulty lay in his own
inability to bring about a profound enough hypnotic trance. So
Bernheim tried to do something for the woman. He failed; and
frankly admitted to Freud that his success had been only with hos-
pital patients and not with private cases.*

Freud returned to Vienna, still without a theory but in a high
state of enthusiasm. A beginning was now being made. He had
the doctrine of repression: that the hysterical symptom originated
in an unpleasant sensation or experience or impulse, which, having
been repressed, released its energy through the devious path of the
symptom. But this was only a beginning; a vast field of investiga-
tion and exploration stretched out in front of him.

He plunged into the construction of a theory with three prin-
ciples firmly entrenched in his mind.

It appeared to him that the first of these principles must be
determinism, because the symptoms he dealt with were not mean-
ingless. They were not random or haphazard. They had a definite
cause and a definite reason for appearing as they did. This impres-
sion of determinism Freud had borne with him since hearing
Goethe’s essay on nature while still in school: nothing in nature
is the result of chance, everything has its law.

His second principle he had derived directly from his experi-
ences with patients. The sought-after origin of the symptom was
not on the surface— that is, it was not conscious. It operated in a
hidden part of the mind: the unconscious. With this definite divi-

* This phenomenon is probably due to the general tendency that makes hos-
pital and ward patients more suggestible and submissive to the physicians than

private patients.

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

31a

sion of the mind into an unconscious and a conscious, Freud was
only indexing everyday observation: but what an uproar it raised!
The philosophers and old-fashioned psychologists could not con-
cede that there was any more to the mind than what was imme-
diately at hand. How could there be an “unconscious mental”?
they asked. Did not mental mean conscious? With such quibbling
Freud could waste no time. The facts were there for all to see:
the evidence of a single hypnotic experiment alone sufficed to
convince that there was something beneath the surface— something
that required unnatural means to come to the surface.

Freud’s final premise was the most significant of the three. This
also had been taught him by the cases he had studied; repression
was necessitated by unpleasantness, associated in some way with
the repressed material. This unpleasantness might be merely a re-
sult of a shock suffered in an experience, which caused that experi-
ence to be forgotten— that is, hidden in the unconscious— or might
be the accompaniment of strong conflicting emotions within the
patient, such as sexual love for a person too closely related for legal
or moral gratification of the impulse.

With these three concepts in mind- determinism, the unconscious,
and the avoidance of the unpleasant in conscious life— Freud now
set out to solve tlie mysteries of human mentality.

In 1895 Freud and Breuer published their results in the Studien
Ueher Hysterie. They called the attention of the medical world to
phenomena which had never before been properly interpreted or
understood. They gave case histories from their own practice, illus-
trating the phenomena of conversion, by which an emotional expe-
rience was changed into a physical manifestation, such as a symptom,
which had no conscious or apparent relation to the exciting cause.
“The hysterical symptoms are built up at the cost of the repressed
emotions.” They gave in the Studien the method of catharsis, and
cited case after case in which this new technique had been proved
successful.

' , They presented to the world of medicine a definitely worth-

while method for treating a disease that up to that time had been
: completely obscure, and the world of medicine ignored them. What

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513

notices the book did receive were for the most part derogatory,
but at least the book reviewers recognized the existence of this
new interpretation. The majority of the medical profession, how-
ever, turned its back in scorn.

There was a deeper reason for this antagonistic attitude by or-
ganized medicine than merely its conventional conservatism. There
was something in the Studien that gave a hint of a revolution to
come, a revolution that was to shake many time-honored puri-
tanical notions and overturn cherished moralistic values. Even
Breuer had drawn back from recognizing in the study of hysteria
the factor that Freud realized must be recognized, the fundamental
source of every case of neurosis that had come before him: the in-
evitable drive of sex.

To be sure, there was comparatively little emphasis laid on it.
Freud had not yet penetrated deeply enough into the mystery to
have encountered the bogey in all its intensity. Breuer, fourteen
years the elder and a family physician, with the prejudices and
opinions of his time, had deprecated even the discussion of sexu-
ality that managed to get into the Studien. Nevertheless the begin-
nings were there.

Against the potentiality of this threat all the powers of darkness
and prudery began to arm themselves. For the ban upon the dis-
cussion of sexual matters was deep-rooted. The subject was taboo
virtually everywhere, in schoolroom, in the home, in the lecture
hall— for the most part even in the doctor’s consultation room.
It was not so much a conscious conspiracy of silence against what
we today flippantly refer to as the “facts of life”; it was a deep-set,
all-pervading taboo that governed the minds and souls of every
stratum of society.

Here and there a few bold spirits had started a battle for enlight-
enment. Havelock Ellis was just beginning to issue his Studies in
the Psychology of Sex, exhaustive researches and compilations of all
material contributing to the knowledge of the many sides of this
vast subject. Krafft-Ebing in Germany had published, for medical
men only, his Psychopathia Sexualis, relating the history of thou-
sands of cases of abnormal and diseased sexuality. Edward Car-
penter was then offering his Love’s Coming of Age to publisher

314

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

after publisher who refused to print it. Except for these and a few
other bold pioneers the darkness of ignorance was complete.

To relieve the stygian blackness of this situation there came
Sigmund Freud whose mind, through some quirk of inheritance
or environment, had managed to escape the widespread prejudices
and taboos against sex. Neither expecting nor wanting to find any
one source more than another, he had studied the cases of thou-
sands of neurotics, and had evolved a method by which those sources
might be brought to the surface. Now that this method was in
full operation, even while the Studien Ueber Hysterie was coming
from the press, Freud was encountering more and more clearly
defined evidences that at the core of each of the traced symptoms
was nothing but a reaction of one kind or another against sexuality.

Freud did not start with a preconceived idea that sex was all-
important. Although his mind was far and away more receptive
and clear-thinking than those of other investigators, he had at first
accepted the current tendency to ignore sexual factors in neurosis.
He felt at first that he would be insulting his patients by assum-
ing such factors. But against his will, as it were, he found these
factors continually forced upon him.

He published a paper on anxiety neurosis before he published
the Studien. Anxiety neurosis was a special kind of nervous dis-
order, characterized by phobias and apparently inexplicable fears.
He applied his technique to his patients in order to get at the
origin of the symptoms, and in each case the patient finally re-
vealed a gross abuse of the sexual function. Masturbation, coitus
interruptus, coitus reservatus, these were the sort of abuses that
almost invariably were present in cases of anxiety neurosis. When
the patient ceased the practice and returned to a normal sex life,
the symptoms vanished. What else could Freud conclude? The
sexual function was at the base of the disorder.

In his discussion of hysteria and the neuroses of defense, where
an hysterical symptom of one kind or another was adopted as
a means of escape from’ an unbearable idea, in each case he found
-that the unbearable idea was connected with sexual experiences
I' ^ y^d sexual sensatippsjr'Iferq; such cases as that of the girl

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315

I who suddenly became an hysteric when her sister died. Treatment
i by hypnosis disclosed that the trouble had arisen at the deathbed,
! when the thought had suddenly flashed across her mind that now
i her brother-in-law was free to marry her. Shocked by having, even
for a moment, entertained such an idea, she had developed the hys-
teria as a defense. When their origins had been brought to the
; surface by catharsis, the symptoms disappeared,
i Everywhere that Freud came across a neurosis of the sort he had
been studying, he encountered sooner or later the factor of sex.
i He was cautious about generalizing. In his paper on the defense
I neuroses he merely stated that “such unbearable ideas develop in
I women chiefly in connection with sexual factors. ... In all the
I cases I have analyzed it has been in the sexual life that a painful
i effect had originated. ... I merely . . . state that hitherto I have
not discovered any other origin of it.”

I When he later thought the matter out, he could see clearly why
; neuroses sprang from sexual causes. Was it not in precisely this
I sphere that ignorance and suppression were most pronounced?

Were not sexual impulses more than any others denied free ex-
j pression? What was more natural than that that part of nature
I which came into direct conflict with civilization should be the
region whence disorders arose?

He thought that it would be comparatively easy to persuade his
medical colleagues of this. They must certainly in their own prac-
tice have encountered the sexual factor time and again. Certainly
they would be eager to hear the conclusions of a man working
in a field where the sexual factor was the chief motif. Freud de-
( cided to forget his former rebuffs at the hands of organized medicine
and present these latest conclusions to the world.

Once more he was rudely disappointed. These men did not want
to hear any data concerned with sexuality. They received him
coldly, called him an extremist and faddist. An atmosphere of dis-
approval settled upon the medical meetings when Freud read his
j papers. Even the doctors who had previously patted him on the
back were no longer so tolerant. They denounced him as obscene,
perverted, lewd. One detractor openly boasted before a group of
his colleagues that he employed Freud’s method of going to the
origin of a svmptom, but stopped, immediately and silenced the

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316

patient as soon as he or she began to talk of things sexual. This
was the last straw. Such speciousness in argument made Freud
realize that he must accept the status of an outcast; that he be-
longed to those who have “disturbed the sleep of the world.”

Convinced that he had struck out upon his road alone, he set
himself with renewed zeal to the task of unraveling the mysteries
of mind as an independent investigator. He threw to the winds
every fear and drove single-mindedly towards his goal. His material
existence, which had so often dictated his choice of a course of
action, now became a secondary consideration. He lost many pa-
tients because he asked them questions about their sexual life.
They were shocked, irritated, shaken; and they decided to consult
a less blunt and less outspoken doctor. His friends, except for a very
few, faded away; a “vacuum formed about his person.”

But what conquests of the mysteries had he not already accom-
plished on his own initiative! He had first of all laid bare the fact
of repression— that the unpleasant in life, the unbearable emotion-
ally, is repressed into the unconscious, while the energy attached
to it finds its equivalent expression in a neurotic symptom. He
had seen, also, that these repressions were apparently invariably
attached to the sexual life of the patients.

He had learned also, by consolidating the discovery of Breuer
with the teachings of Charcot and adding the interpretation he him-
self had made, that when the disturbing, repressed emotion was
given a chance at expression (by the mere fact of its narration to
the doctor) this simple expedient was sufficient to discharge the
energy and correspondingly relieve the symptom.

From these facts he had progressed to other deductions, each
an inevitable step in the elucidation of that theory of the mind
towards which he strove. Since the repression was eliminated (with
the elimination of consciousness by the means of hypnosis), it must
follow that the repressing agent was a part of the conscious. He
adopted what he called the “topographical method of approach,”
and sought to work out a chart which should be an index— purely
hypothetical of course— to the various agents and factors of the
mind. By this means of approach he represented the consciousness

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317

: as dominated by the ego, which holds in check and represses the
impulses arising in the unconscious. These impulses are chiefly
i those of the libido, a term Freud took from the Latin to denote
f i the whole sum of energy connected with the sexual instinct. As
I years passed, he was to find the topographical approach more
I and more convenient in elaborating his conceptions
j The goal of the treatment was, then, to release the energy in-
herent in the symptom and the repression by bringing the repressed
j material to the surface. In other words, it was to strengthen the

■ ego, and let it recognize the sources of its own discomforts and
i disorders, so that it might make a reasoned, intelligent, conscious
' disposition of them. This, Freud felt, was all that the doctor could

do; the point was now to find out how best this end might be
I served.

I He was fast finding that his old methods were inadequate. For one
■: thing, they restricted him to the treatment of hysteria and its

allied forms of disorder. Hypnosis had other drawbacks. It often
afforded only temporary relief. It did not seem to penetrate deeply

■ enough into the unconscious. It was, besides, dangerous, for persons
hypnotized too often had a tendency to acquire a mental lassitude

i and general predisposition that made them susceptible to the slight-
j est suggestion on the part of the physician, even when they were
’ in a normal waking state.

i From another point of view, hypnotic methods definitely limited
; the analyst in his effort to discover the mechanisms that caused the
disorder. By eliminating consciousness, it eliminated the repressing
; forces, so that these forces could not be observed. He was cutting
himself off, by the use of hypnosis, from one of the most poten-
: tially fruitful sources of observation. It was by observing the con-

scious struggling against the repressed impulses that important facts
! could be learned concerning the nature both of the impulses and
j of the conscious.

: There was also to be considered the fact that he himself had

; never become a very successful hypnotist, and this failing might
I be the case with many men otherwise capable and acute.

' Freud, therefore, was considering seriously the abandonment of

* In the concepts of ego, superego, and id Freud completed his “topography
of the mind.”

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

hypnotism and the cathartic, method/ when, one day an incident
occurred which precipitated .his decision. A female patient whom
he had had under hypnotic treatment for some time suddenly threw
her arms about his neck on awakening from a trance, and a most
embarrassing situation might have arisen, if the unexpected en-
trance of a servant had not cleared the air. Freud wanted no more
such incidents, w’-hich he had absolutely no way of foreseeing from
the information he gathered in the hypnotic treatment. By tacit
agreement hypnosis was no longer employed, and he was forced to
resort to a new expedient.

He recalled that Bernheim had been able to employ suggestion
by encouraging a subject to recall the forgotten incidents of his
hypnotic trance. With a little prodding and a show of firm insist-
ence, he had managed to reconstruct in the patient’s conscious mind
the image of the occurrences of the trance. Obviously, the patient
really '*knew” these occurrences; it was merely that some automa-
tism of his mind suppressed them.

Freud’s own neui-otic patients must also “know” the origin of
their symptoms; the point was then to find a way to bring them
to know it consciously. For this purpose he began to use Bern-
heim’s method of insisting on the subject’s remembering, sometimes
laying his hand on his forehead. It worked well; the forgotten
origins returned at first gradually and then suddenly flooded the
patient’s mind with vivid recollection.

The method had certain defects: it was too easy to suggest some-
thing to the patient that a repressive ego would eagerly adopt as
a substitute for the truth. It involved a great strain on both physi-
cian and patient. But it was the best available; and Freud employed
it for some time.

With the abandonment of hypnosis and the Breuer methods of
achieving catharsis, Freud changed the name of his technique. He
devised for it the title psychoanalysis.

Freud’s discovery, in continued research, of sexuality and libido
in children was something the world was unprepared to receive
in view of a semireligious belief in the absolute innocence of child-
hood. From time immemorial people had regarded childhood as

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319

a period apart from the rest of life, a period free from the so-called
sordid processes of sex and desire. That there should exist in “the
sweet purity of childhood” any clear resemblances to grown-up
desires and to grown-up sex urges was something utterly unthink-
able— and shocking!

As a matter of fact, Freud himself was reluctant to believe it.
For he too was reared in the same age-old tradition. Inevitably,
however, he was led by the analysis of hundreds of sexually dis-
turbed people to find the origin of the disturbances in this new,
this revolutionary concept of infantile sexuality. The Sphinx of
Sex, yielding to the cool advance of his analytic genius, had revealed
another of her aspects to him: he was coming closer and closer to
the final mysteries.

He knew that his idea of libido must be expanded to include
this new region, hitherto undreamed of. Sexuality could no longer
be confined to the narrow field of adult desires and their fulfill-
ment. Children were sexual, he could see that from the childhood
reminiscences his patients poured out. But they were not sexual
in the same way as adults. The objects of their desires were differ-
ent. Their impulses were vague and amorphous. More important,
their repressive mechanisms were unformed, and the taboos and
disgusts and morality of grown people could not affect them. Here
was a new type of sexuality which needed to be analyzed and un-
derstood before he could hope to comprehend the mind in all
its phases.

But something came up at the very outset of his new research
that sidetracked him, threatened to bring all his analysis to an
impasse and almost wrecked the theory he had so laboriously
worked out. He had never had occasion to discard the views of
Charcot, that hysteria originated in a violent experience which
damaged psychic equilibrium. When his patients, therefore, began
telling, him of childhood reminiscences of violent sexual happen-
ings, he was at first inclined to believe them. Undoubtedly it was
true that in some cases the direct cause of the neurosis was a forcible
seduction of the patient in early childhood by an, older person.
Freud did not question the authenticity, therefore, of the stories
of seduction and abuse of the passive bodies of children which

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320

his patients told him in great detail. But when many such cases
began to accumulate in his notebook he began to wonder.

There was one young woman in particular whose father Freud
knew as a man of the most irreproachable honor. Carrying his
analysis to the stage where reminiscences of her early childhood
had been reached, Freud was amazed when the patient confided
to him that at the age of six her father had seduced her. Freud
felt it could not be true. Yet he had obtained this confidence along
paths of analysis that he had carefully tested, carefully thought out
and established. Could it be that he had been working along totally
false grounds? Had he made an initial error that had invalidated
all his later findings? Such doubts assailed him, but careful recapitu-
lation failed to show any such error.

There was only one possibility. The story told by the patient
was not a lie, he could be sure of this; but it was fictitious and
imaginary— in short, an hysterical phantasy. Was it therefore to
be discarded as unimportant? Here Freud’s fundamental principle
of determinism entered the picture. If the patient had conceived
such phantasies, it must have been with an unconscious motive.
There must have been a purpose in creating these detailed images
of imaginary happenings. This purpose, if uncovered, would be
sure to yield clues and implications to expand his knowledge of
mentality. “If hysterics trace back their symptoms to fictitious
traumas,” Freud reasoned, “this newer fact signifies that they create
such scenes in fantasy, and psychical reality must be taken into
account alongside actual reality.”

What did the sexual life of the child consist of? Obviously its
desires were not those of the adult. Rather they were directed
toward random objects, toward the individual himself, toward his
surroundings, toward his parents. The fantasies conjured up by the
patients were obviously elevations to an adult level of sexual activi-
ties considered disgraceful or insignificant or inglorious. Whereupon
Freud, realizing this, set about learning from his patients— and,
later, by observing the activities of children— just how infantile sex-
uality manifested itself.

He found confirmation of his premise that the sexual function
existed from the very beginning of the individual’s life. The dis-
tinction that had to be made, however, was that at first the infan-

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321

tile mind did not distinguish this impulse from any other vital
function. Eating, drinking, playing, excreting, and other physio-
logical processes all served as modes of expressing the libido that
stirred within the child. The genitals, through which the adult
satisfied his sexuality, were undeveloped in the child, had not yet
become the center of erotic activity. But tire libido was nevertheless
present, just as was the desire to eat and drink, and consequently it
found its expression through the available and already developed
channels of physiological life.

The libido did not always develop smoothly and normally. Child-
hood was filled with situations, experiences, and maladjustments
which tended to make one of these early components unduly strong,
or to give a premature gratification to the instinct before its proper
and normal outlet had been provided. Such a mishap often caused
a fixation of the instinct at the point where it occurred; so that the
individual was frequently inhibited from progressing further than ^
this infantile or pre-puberty stage in his sexual life.

And here Freud came upon another astonishing fact, the promul-
gation of which brought down upon his head more anathema than
any preceding part of his theory.

The next foundation stone of the psychoanalytic structure was
the Oedipus complex.

After the auto-erotic stage of early sexual desire had been passed,
Freud found that the libido began to look outside for its love ob-
jects. While still in the early days of infancy, when the pregenital
stages were still predominant, the child began to center its love
objects in the person of one or the other of the two nearest indi-
viduals— the parents.

Boys turned their desires and their love toward the person of
their mothers; girls developed the same emotional relation toward
their fathers. To be sure, this was nothing particularly new or un-
familiar: the phenomenon of boys romanticizing about their moth-
ers and girls about their fathers had been observed many times
before.

But no investigator had ever sought to draw from this situation
the implications and interpretations that lay behind it. Freud found

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322

that the love of a boy for his mother did not stop at that. He was
not content with loving the mother. The boy (Freud realized from
the tales his patients told him) developed hostile wishes against
his father, was jealous of the man who preceded him in the loved
one’s affections, sought to take the father’s place.

These two components— love of the mother and antagonism to
the father— Freud found sooner or later in every case of a male
neurotic that he analyzed, and an analogous situation with the
female. He quickly realized that this was the fundamental struc-
ture of one of mankind’s great myths— the Oedipus story of the man
who unwittingly (unconsciously) killed his father and married his
mother. And the myth held true to what psychoanalytic, research
had disclosed. Oedipus, when he became conscious of his offense
against morality and his violation of society’s taboos against incest,
had gone mad (become neurotic), had tom out his eyes and fled
from the land.

Impressed by the vividness with which the old Greek story fol-
lowed his own investigations, Freud called his newest discovery
the Oedipus complex.

Now he had a clue to the fantasies of sexual assault that his pa-
tients had invented: they had gone through childhood accumulat-
ing the Oedipus complex. The adult woman presented the analyst
with a picture, not of the inglorious actuality of the past, but of
her own fulfilled wishes, in which her desire to assume her mother’s
role toward her father had been achieved. Fantasies, then, were wish-
fulfillments— desires become actuality. The unconscious, battered
and checked by the repressions of the outer world acting through
the ego, invented a shadow world of its own, in which its desires
were completed and its love gratified.

There were other kinds of fantasies besides these that were
brought out in the analytic treatment, and there were other aspects
of fantasies that now demanded his attention.

His patients were continually telling him their dreams.

He did not ask for them, but when a stage of analysis had been
reached where the repressive mechanism had been to some degree
eliminated, the patient began to relate the dreams he experienced.

FREUD

§33

as if intuitively he knew that these were further clues to the intri-
cate mysteries of his mind. Freud soon came himself to realize that
in the dream he might find an able assistant in his analysis.

It now appeared evident that in sleep, when the rigid bonds
placed upon the unconscious by the ego were relaxed, the desires
and yearnings of the patient came closer to expression and sought
in the fantasy-creating ability of the brain the outlet that in waking
life was closed to it.

Dreams, which had long been considered by science as nothing
more than the distorted reflexes of indigestion and similar in-
significant physical manifestations, Freud discovered had a mean-
ing. The ancients had thought the gods sent dreams in order to
predict the future; in medieval times the function of interpreting
dreams had been relegated to witches. At any rate, dreams were
considered idle nonsense and any suggestion that they had mean-
ing was regarded as a foolish superstition. But now Freud realized
the dream had meaning, as much meaning as he had found in those
hitherto despised neurotic symptoms. More tenaciously than ever,
he clung to his original principle: that everything in nature has its
function and its law. It was once more vindicated as he unraveled
the age-old mystery of dreaming.

He realized at the outset that the apparent content of the dream
was not the fundamental thing. These fantastic, disconnected and
distorted images that swirled through the sleep of his patients were
merely translations of desires and ideas hidden as deeply in the
unconscious as the origins of any ordinary neurotic symptom. The
surface manifestations of dreams were symbols of, that is substitutes
for, basic ideas. In sleep just as in waking there was a repressive
mechanism operating to twist and distort and render unrecogniza-
ble the unpleasant truth that lay at the bottom of mentality.

All that he learned bore out his main, original idea-everything
in psychic life had a meaning. The apparently irrelevant hysterical
symptom, the so-called perversions, considered generally to be ran-
dom choices dictated by chance heredity, now possessed definite
significance. The wild and incoherent ramblings of the dream— the
evasions employed to forget important parts of the dream— all these
phenomena had purpose. T

He interested himself for a time in the phenomena of that ordi-

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

nary, everyday, normal process known as forgetting. Why did people
forget? Because the thing was unimportant? Sometimes, no doubt.
But there were plenty of cases in his own experience when im-
portant things had been forgotten— things that should be remem-
bered. Why was this?

He examined several instances of this type of forgetting. His ex-
pectations were rewarded— here again no casual chance was operat-
ing in the mental process. In each case of forgetting the thing
forgotten was mentally associated with something unpleasant— an
experience, or a distasteful personality. A lover forgot a rendezvous,
not because of the pressure of business, as he told his mistress, and
convinced himself, but because he was tired of her, wished to be
rid of her— and his unconscious carried out his hidden wish by
causing him to forget.

Freud went farther, and examined other phenomena of every-
day life. Blunders of speech and action, long considered random
events, he learned were actually no such thing. The little slips of
the tongue that people made, remarks that startled and amused
their listeners, the errors that crept into print, absurd errors that
seemed to be purely unfortunate mistakes, even the mistakes of
action, in which one acted as if in an hypnotic trance, and. carried
out a mandate not consciously dictated— all these Freud found to
have definite and traceable origins. They were lapses of the ego,
the supervisory agent of the mind— which was caught off guard long
enough to allow a hint of the unconscious desires to slip through
to the outside world, or else caused an error to be substituted for
the thing actually intended— which was found to have some unpleas-
ant connotation or other.

On the original issue of sexuality, Freud was entirely alone. He
fought the battles for his theory unaided. Completely by himself
he built it up, developed its potentialities, tested and examined
the huge mass of material it made available. The independence
; of thought initiated in him, in his university days, when anti-
Semitism had cut him off firom the good things of the spirit, had
been intensified by his experiences since that time. He was at times
bitter, and at times discouraged, but these depressed interludes

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325

became fewer as the knowledge grew in him that he had really
discovered tremendous things and had achieved a marvelous theory.
For a while he adopted an attitude of resignation, for it seemed
that the ostracism he had been subjected to was having its effect
and the theory of psychoanalysis was not destined to come to light.
In these moods he felt the assurance that some time after his death
a new investigator would explore these same mysterious pathways,
would encounter his work, and be aided by it.

But he kept on working.

He published his theories of the dream in 1900. The book fell
almost completely flat. It was not that it lacked point: it had too
muchl Hardly a review appeared in the technical journals, usually
so eager to notice any new material. Oddly enough the same medi-
cal profession that professed to ignore Freud’s work now began to
go out of its way to refute it. Here and there books were being
written which attempted to elucidate fallacies in Freud’s ideas:
the same ideas which they refused to notice in their journals.
Despite opposition, what Freud stood for was becoming known,
albeit in a vague and distorted fashion. To be sure, few took the
trouble to read his books and examine his arguments. One man
wrote an entire volume against Freud’s dream theory. Later he con-
fessed to Freud that he had never read The Interpretation of
Dreams; he had been told at a leading clinic that it was not worth-
while.

On the heels of his theories of the dream, Freud issued a book
setting forth his discoveries in the field of everyday errors and
forgetting. He called it the Psycho-Pathology of Everyday Life. This
work attracted some attention, and later proved instrumental in
bringing to psychoanalysis a great deal of popularity.

In 1905 the theories of sexuality were given to the world in
coherent and complete form. Now Freud began to arouse open
opposition. The denunciations that had before been scathing but
made behind closed doors, so to speak, were now issued in public.
The skirmish period was over. With the appearance in open view
of the Oedipus complex, the theory of infantile sexuality and the
whole doctrine of sexuality as the root of neuroses, war was de^
dared upon Freud. All manner of malediction and polemic poured
down upon him. He was denounced as a degenerate, a pervert, a

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326

fool, a sensationalist— terms that will remind the reader of the
opposition to Copernicus, to Darwin, to Pasteur.

Although he was still the center of the mounting storm of
anathemas, sneers and criticisms his lone fight was over. For more
than ten years he had borne the brunt by himself; but in 1902 a
group of younger men began to gather to his standard. He had
gradually achieved a new circle of friends to replace those who
had fled horror-stricken from his contaminated person. Most of these
new friends were colleagues. They sent him patients, called him in
consultations, and tried to create a wider public for his books. Sev-
eral of them submitted themselves to his treatment; and one in
particular showed his gratitude by forming a sort of unofficial group
of young men for the express purpose of learning, practicing and
spreading the knowledge of psychoanalysis.

This group began to meet regularly at Freud’s house. Every
Wednesday evening they would gather to discuss matters psycho-
analytic, relate their own experiences and the histories of their
patients. Freud presided, a paper would be read, and everyone
present was expected to participate in the discussion. This was the
nucleus of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society. Among its members
were Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Otto Rank and Isidor Sadger.

Gradually the circle enlarged its influence. The Freudian doc-
trines began to spread wider and wider in the medical conscious-
ness. Slowly the conquest of Vienna advanced, and as it spread
it made significant headway in other countries. Each step was bit-
terly contested by the orthodox— as was to be expected. In all the
history of psychoanalysis no country was more vehement against
it than Freud’s own Austria. The ugliest weapons were used in
an effort to turn the tide. Opprobrium, vileness and cruel slander
were hurled at the apostles. An iron ring of disapproval seemed to
have been formed about the young science.

But in 1906 the scene suddenly shifted. Psychoanalysis had been
gaining ground, unnoticed by even its adherents. From Switzerland
came news of a great victory for the theory.

'v':;’ . ? ; 13

. When Darwin received tbe now famous letter from Alfred Russel
iWallace oh that rnemorablfe Jtme day in 1858, he could not have

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327

been more profoundly stirred than Freud was when a letter arrived
from Eugen Bleuler, the great Swiss clinician. In the case of Dar-
win, Wallace had written to ask corroboration; in the case of Freud
it was somewhat different. Bleuler wrote to the Viennese theorist
to inform him that psychoanalysis was being studied assiduously in
Switzerland and that the Burgholzli Clinic in Zurich was making
good use of it. To one who had battled so long against such heavy
odds here was encouragement of the first magnitude. Later it was
to be greatly heightened when, in January, 1907, the Zurich Clinic
sent its representative Doctor Eitington to Vienna to learn the
Freudian methods at first hand.

Out of this experience there sprang up a voluminous correspond-
ence between Freud and his Swiss converts. Particularly valuable
were the efforts of Carl Gustave Jung, at that time assistant physi-
cian at Burgholzli, who arranged the first Psychoanalytic Congress
in Salzburg. Representatives from Geneva, London and the United
States were present. Of course the Viennese and Zurich groups were
outstanding. Besides the beneficial discussions the meeting will long
be remembered for having established the first Jahrbuch (Journal)
for psychoanalytic studies by Freud and Bleuler, and edited by
Jung.

Now that psychoanalysis had achieved the merited status of an
international science, Freud, working with Jung, proceeded to
carry the battle farther. In the autumn of 1909 the two went to
the United States to lecture on psychoanalysis at Clark Univer-
sity. Unfortunately, the overenthusiasm of the Americans did
psychoanalysis more harm than good. No one felt it more keenly
than Freud; he was disappointed in his American trip.

He returned to Vienna at once to continue his research and
battle.

Meanwhile Freudian ideas were being advanced all over the
world. In 19 u Havelock Ellis was able to write that the theories of
the Viennese physician were being championed in Austria, Switzer-
land, the United States, Great Britain, India, Canada and Aus-
tralia. Branches of the Association were formed in Zurich, Berlin,
Vienna, Munich, Budapest and London. The American Psycho-
analytic Association was founded in 1911 by A. A. Brill.

Psychoanalysis, no longer the exclusive work of Freud, found

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328

other men, other investigators, to check and add to the findings
that had led Freud to his theory. The doctrine took on the definite
aspect of a co-operative movement. The field was so broad that
Freud had necessarily left a large part of it untouched. His disciples
began to investigate these virgin areas.

But Freud remained the spearhead of the advance. Now that his
victory had been assured he had no thought of resting on his
laurels. He had attracted to himself a large number of disciples
whom he respected and admired, but he was not content to sit back
and let them take up the burden of carrying forward the science
he had created. The battle had, at any rate, by no means been
completely won; and then there were wide possibilities of further
argument, proof and detail. So he turned his attention to the elabo-
ration of some of the ideas that in the first rush of driving toward
the main goal he had treated only sketchily.

One of these details was the libido theory. Libido he had defined
as the energy attached to the sexual instincts, but he had been
forced several times to modify and expand this idea. Infantile sexu-
ality had caused him to reinterpret libido in terms not necessarily
of adult desire, but also of all the broad and far-reaching range of
feeling and emotional manifestations grouped under the names of
love, friendship, affection and romance. He saw that human beings
possessed a peculiar quality of sublimation, by which they were
able to discharge a portion of their libido-energy in other modes
than the sexual. The energy of the athlete, of the businessman,
of the social worker, of the artist was now seen as translated libido.

A more direct explanation of sublimation Freud obtained from
a new insight he gained into infantile sexuality. Before the forma-
tion of the Oedipus complex, before the individual was sufficiently
aware of himself even to differentiate between parents, there was
a stage where the libido was contained in the ego. This stage Freud
called narcissism, from the Greek myth of the youth Narcissus who
fell in love with his own image in a pool. This narcissistic state,
Freud recognized, never completely vanishes throughout the in-
dividual’s life but persists in various manifestations.

FREUD

In less than a generation the Freudian theory has swept across
the world. Barely thirty years old, psychoanalysis has proved fruitful
in application to education, medicine, anthopology, philology,
philosophy, biology, mythology, history, religion, aesthetics, soci-
ology, law and many subdivisions of scientific research. It has affected
every branch of literature, especially leaving its deep impress upon
biography and the drama.

On May 6, 1936, the world celebrated the eightieth birthday
of Sigmund Freud. Despite the difficulty of evaluating the work of
a contemporary the leading scientific journals generously acknowl-
edged the universal influence of his views. From obscurity he has
slowly arisen into recognition and fame. The city of Vienna made
him an honorary citizen and in 1935 he was elected an honorary
member of the Royal Medical Society of England. It is frankly
admitted that “no other man has contributed a greater stimulus
toward study and understanding of psychologic phenomena.” In its
birthday editorial the Journal of the American Medical Association
used these words: “The position of Freud as a great leader is secure.
Great epochs in medicine are defined by great leaders. As we asso-
ciate Vesalius with anatomy, Harvey with physiology, Virchow with
pathology and Pasteur with bacteriology, we shall come to consider
Sigmund Freud as the founder of a new trend of thought in psy-
chiatry— an investigator with a ‘profound insight into the workings
of primitive mentality.’ ”

Psychoanalysis has done more than make new material avail-
able in science, art and literature. By providing a new approach to
mental phenomena it has fashioned a new outlook on the world.

For one thing Freud demonstrated and made inescapable the
concept that everything in nature has a meaning. He went so far
as to make even the tiny blunders of man’s speech, the insignificant
gestures of his hands, the fantastic forms of his dreams take on
importance and value. He removed the mark of triviality from
everyday life, infusing our common living with significance and
pointedness.

Literature and the criticism of literature have been immeasur-
ably enriched by Freudian views. It is almost superfluous to cite

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

such far-flung examples as the Ulysses of James Joyce, the Remem-
brance of Things Past of Marcel Proust, the novels of Arthur
Schnitzler, the dramas of Eugene O’Neill, the poetry of Robinson
Jeffers, the criticism of Ludwig Lewisohn, The Magic Mountain of
Thomas Mann, all of which owe much of their orientation and a
ponderable part of their actual material either to Freud directly
or to the general pervasion of the intellectual atmosphere with the
essence of Freudian teaching.

Significant too is the fact that Freud demonstrated that the nor-
mal mind is subject to the same laws and the same mechanisms
as the abnormal, the difference being that the neurotic breaks down
under the same strain that the normal ego is able to conquer and
adjust. To the charge made against him that he attempts to prove
that everything normal is pathological, Freud can answer that he
has on the other hand demonstrated that the pathological is itself
normal.

To sum up in one paragraph his contribution to the technique
of understanding human nature, it must be pointed out that Sig-
mund Freud completely changed the science of psychology, the
science which before him was a dry and dreary cataloguing of mis-
understood and useless facts. He found psychology mechanical and
by his genius made it functional; he found it automatic and trans-
formed it into the dynamic. Freud made his work, originally only
a laboratory technique, a guide to human life, behavior and the
pursuit of happiness. For all this he has been called the Columbus
of the mindl

But the Freudian system has not come into the world without
severe attacks. One of the main issues is, of course, Freud’s explana-
tion of the role of sexuality. It is not to be denied that he has
received much of the blame for the rashness and inaccuracies of his
disciples. It was not until his latest book was published that many
reviewers became aware that he had never asserted that all dreams
had a sexual basis. It was a generalization by his disciples for which
he was made to assume responsibility. That he does stress sexuality
far beyond any of his predecessors is, however, undeniable: it was
natural, Freud pointed out, for the disorders of neurosis to arise
from the sexual instincts, because this was precisely the area that

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331

j was repressed. There was no inhibition upon the other natural

: functions of the body. It was certainly to be expected that the

emotion denied full expression would be the source of any trouble
i that arose.

The Freudian tendency towards looseness in definition has been
I discussed by Havelock Ellis. Terms like narcissism, auto-erotism,
Oedipus complex, Ellis has pointed out, are frequently used in
Freudian literature with varying connotations, although in Freud’s
own writings every modification in the meaning of a word has been
explained before adoption.

\ In order better to deal with material it has always been neces-
sary to group it and to interpret it, however tentatively, before one
: can hope to attain any comprehensive survey. For this purpose one

resorts to the working hypothesis— the temporary makeshift explana-
tion that brings a semblance of order into the chaos. This hypothe-
sis may be later discarded— it is of course important that the man
forming it keep it flexible to admit new evidence. For the time
being it serves as a framework. Such “working hypotheses’’ are to be
I found in many of Freud’s concepts— such as the ego, the id, the
preconscious, and the various suggestions he has thrown out in
the fields of religion and literature.

Oftentimes the critics of Freud have been slow to understand
this idea of temporary hypothesis. To advance the dogmatic rule
that in science no generalization may be made until it can be
demonstrated and established in every detail is admittedly too
harsh. If Copernicus had heeded this dogma, he could never have
elaborated his theory; certainly Hutton, Malthus, Marx and others
I would have been lost in a morass of confusing and contradictory
data. It is necessary to make assumptions. The ability to make
them and the genius for bringing them as close as possible to the
actuality are marks of the theorizing mind.

13. Chamberlin . . theory of the

ORIGIN OF OUR PLANET

SPECULATIONS concerning the origin of the earth have long ■
held the attention of mankind. The first theory to attempt a scien- |

tific view of how our planet came into being was expounded in t

1754 by Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher. Logically, of i
course, this chapter should begin with him. But because the ghosts
of dead beliefs sway man far more than the things which can
be seen and measured, it is necessary to understand first those long
centuries of prescientific thought when people zealously believed
in the so-called “creation legends.”

In geology, as in everything else, present conceptions are the
results of long periods of growth.

- 8 ■

Perhaps the oldest of the hypotheses formed to explain the origin
of the earth was the cosmogony of Hesiod in the eighth century
B.c. This early thinker was among the first of those alert and curi-
ous Greeks who sought to explain things. The mark of the theorist
is that he thinks cosmically— he contemplates the universe as a whole.
This Hesiod did. He conceived the earth as originating in primeval
chaos, giving birth to the heavens, the mountains, and the oceans,
which in turn gave birth to the gods. All these ideas Hesiod set !
down in his Theogony, a poem of grand scope displaying the early
manifestations of the theorizing mind. Hesiod had a passion for
co-ordination; he took the legends of the gods and their offspring
and made an attempt to work them into an understandable system
for the men of his day.

■ 3 , (

Oriental literature has preserved for us many fanciful cosmog-
onies. It is not difficult to imagine how myths and fables sprang 1
up, stories which appealed to the peoples of those far off days
because they were intermingled with ideas of religion.

m '' i

CHAMBERLIN

With the rise of Christianity the creation legends of the Hebrew
scriptures became a part of the thinking of medieval times. Despite
the fact that the Bible was accepted as a divine revelation of final
and indisputable truth theologians argued across the centuries over
“creation” theories. Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine advocated a
more spiritual understanding but they were loudly shouted down.
So firmly did the notion of creation fiy fingers gt’ip the nfinds of

333

One of the very old Vedic hymns (Rigveda X:9o) declares that
God formed the world from the different members of the body
of a giant. Rather widespread was the belief that at the beginning
of all things there was chaos— a primeval era when matter was dark,
formless, and void. Out of this primeval matter it was thought that
the Deity fashioned a kind of vast world-egg over which He was
naively pictured in a brooding mood. At Elephantine in Egypt it
was believed that the Deity formed this egg from the mud of the
Nile. In the fullness of time this colossal world-egg hatched— that
is, there was a cleft in the middle mahing it possible for the upper
and concave half to rise and form the heavens, leaving the lower
for the earth. Frequently in these old cosmogonies creation is
ascribed to sexual congress.

A popular idea in vogue throughout the antique world was the
belief that God created the visible universe with His hands and
fingers. It was altogether natural for man in the childhood of his
thinking to imagine the Deity an enlarged human being and so
by analogy man did not hesitate to look upon the whole of creation
as “the work of His fingers.” As a potter molds his clay God was
pictured as having shaped all things and then launched forth the
rolling planets into space.

As time went on and man progressed in his thinking the “hands
and fingers” theory of creation was considered too gross. A nobler
view was evolved. No longer was creation to be thought the product
of God’s fingers— it was now ascribed to His voice: “And God saidj
Let there be light: and there was light.”

The Hebrews were not the only people of antiquity who made
this interesting transition from the crude idea of creation by fingers
to the more impressive idea of creation by voice. Egyptian litera-
ture records a similar advance.

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334

Europe that in sculptures, mosaics and stained glass windows medie-
val men represented God working with His hands creating and
shaping the world. In the cathedral of Upsala one may still see
the legend of creation carved in stone above the tomb of Linnaeus,
the famous Swedish naturalist of the eighteenth century. Here,
in a broad succession of scenes, God is represented in the form of
a human being achieving the various acts of creation by sheer physi-
cal exertion.

Closely allied with this biblical theory of creation by fingers
is the story of fossils. As was shown in the chapter on Hutton people
believed that fossils were evidences of Noah and the Flood. Others,
however, held the view that fossils were imperfect models which
God had discarded. The Swiss naturalist, Bertrand, suggested that
fossil plants and animals had been placed in the rocks “directly by
the Creator, with the design of displaying thereby the harmony
of His work and the agreement of the productions of the sea with
those of the land.”

The controversy over creation by fingers and voice was no less
heated than the one dealing with the time element. Did God create
the world in six days or did he do it instantaneously? In the open-
ing chapter of the book of Genesis the statement is very clear that
creation involved six days, but the record chapter knows nothing
of this six-day operation. It deliberately speaks of “the day” in which
“the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.” Here indeed was
a sore dilemma fixed between these two contradictory accounts
lying next to each other within the same book. Which account were
theologians to believe?

Long and bitter were the quarrels on this question. Finally a
reconciliation was arrived at in Which the two divergent accounts
were declared in harmony with each other— that is, it came to be
believed that in some mysterious manner God created the universe
in six days and at the same time brought it into existence instan-
taneously. In its most classical dress this reconciliation was pro-
nounced by St. Thomas Aquinas who eased the puzzling difficulties
by saying that God created the substance of all things in a moment
yet it took Him a full six <^ys to arrange, shape, separate and polish
up His creation, ; :

CHAMBERLIN

335

With the development of learning men began to question the
foundations of “revealed” statements. Just as the Ptolemaic theory
was overthrown by Copernicus, so thinking men in increasing num-
bers could no longer be bound by or permanently satisfied with
the brief and mouth-closing utterance “God created.” They de-
manded to know how. What agencies were employed in creation?
What was the succession of events? Out of these demands have come
some of the most majestic thoughts that have entered the mind of
man. To understand them, even in part, is “to render an intelligent
being more intelligent.”

Modern men had to build a scaffolding of thought to enable
science to reach the skies: this knowledge was not achieved by
leaping there at one bound. It took stupendous daring coupled
with unparalleled resourcefulness and incredible perseverance to
achieve results. For it must always be remembered that progress
did not solely depend upon the discovery of new facts; it was highly
conditioned by the intellectual climate of those days best illus-
trated by that medieval picture which shows a ship turning back at
Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, with the inscription ne plus
ULTRA— -“Go no farther!”

Simply to write about this gigantic task of explaining the origin
of the earth, as a part of the solar system, has a tendency to belittle
the effort because we must state the result and omit the description
of many fruitless quests, false hopes and blind alleys. Again and
again men of science had to be capable of rising Phoenixlike anew
from the ashes of their mistakes. The reason we study their theories
is purely humanistic. Being men we are interested in other men,
and especially in such men as have helped us to fulfill our highest
destiny.

We begin our modem story with Ren^ Descartes (1596-1650),
that acute and original French philosophical genius who divorced
himself from traditional ways of thinking and based his system
upon science. Descartes is important in the history of theory since
he gave the necessary impetus to the sciehtific method by his insist-
ence upon the subjection of every opinion to critical examination.
He pointed the way to truth by stressing the: importance of doubt.

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

336

Just because people have said so and so and believed such and
such for centuries does hot mean that these beliefs are truths.

Not every thought that comes from books, tradition, authority, or
the Church is to be accepted. In fact, declared Descartes, none is

to be accepted except upon rigid examination.

No wonder Descartes’ views were disliked. He began his philos-
ophy not upon the virtues of faith but on doubt. Nothing was to
be taken for granted, everything was to be studied, sifted, analyzed
and proved. Such is the meaning and significance of his remark-
able treatise entitled Discourse Touching the Method of Using One’s
Reason Rightly and of Seeking Scientific Truth.

In the history of theory Descartes is important to us because
he could clearly see that science had to begin with great acts of
doubt even as religions begin with great acts of faith. Copernicus
doubted that the sun goes around the earth; Galileo doubted that
heavy bodies fall faster than light ones; Harvey doubted that the
blood flows into the tissues through the veins. Had not Descartes
been crippled by his morbid fear of the Church, he would have
expressed himself more fully along these lines. But the time was ,

not ripe and he had no wish to suffer at the hands of any inqui-
sition.

Besides being a philosopher Descartes was a mathematician and
a man of science. His one desire was to explain all of the world
(except God) by mechanical and mathematical laws. Because he
lived in an age of inquisition and heresy-hunting, Descartes had
to be unusually careful not to fall into any trap. While in Holland |

he had already written the greater part of a treatise called The |

World, in which he upheld the Copernican theory; but on learning ]
of Galileo’s torture and condemnation, he suppressed the heretical j
portions of it and instead proposed the vortex theory in order to
express his ideas without running counter to the Church. For this
reason his theory only half reveals what he thought; nevertheless
he did express a belief that the earth and the planets were originally
glowing masses like the sun.

For a time after Descartes, scientific thinking halted. Little prog-
ress was made in cosmic speculations until the French scientist
Buffon (1707-1788) devoted a portion of his voluminous Natural
History (printed in 1749) to a theory of the origin of the earth.

CHAMBERLIN 337

Buffon favored the idea of solving the problem of planetary
evolution by the laws of mechanics. He regarded the earth and
planets as parts of the mass of the sun shaken off by the shock of
a comet, whereby the “impulse of rotation and of revolution in
the same general plane was communicated to them.” This thought
of a passing star pulling from the sun the material now in the
planets and their satellites was long neglected until it was revived
in 1880 by Bicker ton of New Zealand and modified by the Ameri-
can theorist, Thomas C. Chamberlin. It is an important contribu-
tion to the understanding of the modern conception of the origin
of our solar system, as will be made evident later on.

We now come to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) whose name was
mentioned in the opening paragraph of this chapter. We are here
not so much interested in the totality of his philosophy as in the
impact of his solar theory. This humble German philosopher very
ably crystallized the advanced thought of his time and developed
many of the ideas grouped together under the familiar name “nebu-
lar hypothesis.”

In their theories and speculations men have wandered far; they
have not only traversed the earth, but they have traveled among
the stars, through intergalactic space, to distances so vast that
the mind must perforce use symbols to understand them. Kant was
of this tribe of speculative mortals who could circumnavigate the
cosmos and return with a co-ordinated vision of it all.

The reason for this irrepressible quest for a united view of the
universe may be found in the very nature of man himself— the
only creature impatient of limitation. Plainly put, man wishes to
understand the universe in origin, in space and in time; for he
himself forms part of it, and it forms part of him. In the mind
of Immanuel Kant this “search” reached unbelievably great pro-
portions. Are these stellar distances enormously fantastic? Then
Kant will evolve for you a theory whose magnificent inclusiveness
will show a linkage between all planets and the sun.

Born of a poor and lowly family in Prussia, Kant became one of
the most important philosophers and theorists of all time. Curiously
enough, Kant never traveled more than diirty miles in his lifetime;

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

338

it is said he never left his native city Konigsberg. Yet this little
man loved to lecture on the geography and ethnology of distant
lands! In those long quiet hours he spent in his study, or when he
walked alone, his thoughts turned to vast speculations. Among
eighteen essays and short studies published before his fortieth
year eleven are discussions of a scientific nature. In several of these
papers there are advanced ideas and hypotheses of profound
originality.

Kant began his career as a private lecturer at the local univer-
sity. At the outset he applied himself to a study of the earth; later
on he switched to metaphysics. While he held the lowly post of
private instructor, much about which he wrote dealt with earth-
quakes, wind, volcanoes, fire, planets and a host of related subjects.
In 1753 he announced, at the end of one of his essays, that he was
about to publish a book under the title Cosmogony, or an Attempt
to devise the Origin of the World, the Constitution of the Heavenly
Bodies, and the Causes of their Motions from the Universal Laws
of the Motion of Matter, according to the Theory of Newton. The
work which he announced appeared in 1775 entitled Universal
Natural History and Theory of the Heavens.

Unfortunately, Kant’s book suffered an untoward fate. Except
for a brief notice in a Hamburg journal it attracted almost no
attention. When it was exhumed many years after his death it
showed at once that this modest philosopher belongs to that line
of original thinkers who have passed over the threshold of the
ordinary into the realm of the extraordinary. Here was a mind that
felt and sensed the spaciousness of all things— -a powerful and un-
tiring brain. In presenting excerpts from Kant’s Universal Natural
History and Theory of the Heavens two leading American astrono-
mers, Doctor Shapley and Doctor Howarth, use these words in
appraisal of Immanuel Kant as a pioneer in the field of cosmic
speculation: “He proposed many of the hypotheses which have been
but recently restated or demonstrated, including the island universe
interpretation of spiral nebulae, the displacement of the sun to the
north of the plane of the Milky Way, and the slowing down of the
earth’s rotation through tidal friction arising from the moon’s
attraction. His most significant contribution was the speculation

CHAMBERLIN 339

on the origin of the planetary system— a nebular hypothesis that
preceded the better-known Laplacian theory by forty years.”

Kant theorized that the material of the solar system had its origin
in a vast nebula. This original nebula would look like one of the
great clouds of gaseous matter which our modern telescopes reveal
among the stars. As this cloud cooled and contracted, it acquired
a whirling motion from west to east and formed a rotating gaseous
disc which gradually condensed at the center to form the em-
bryo sun.

Kant believed that at first the nebula was a cold mass at rest.
In time it began to contract through the mutual attraction of the
particles of the nebula upon each other. As the nebula began to
split up into component parts (and as contraction kept going on),
enough heat was thereby generated to heat the component parts
white-hot. Kant made the quite arbitrary and unwarranted assump-
tion that this process would give rise to a rotation of the whole
mass. He imagined that the central part of the nebula remained
the largest and in time became our flaming sun, while the matter
which gathered around the other nuclei formed the planets and
their attendant satellites. All the planets, Kant thought, have been
or will be inhabited. Those that are farthest from the central mass
(the sun) have had, in all probability, the longest period of growth.
As such they ought to have a higher species of intelligent organisms.

In 1796 the French astronomer Laplace, evidently unaware of
Kant’s theory, advanced one of his own. It appeared in a book en-
titled Exposition du Systeme du Monde. This theory, though in-
ferior in some ways to that of Kant, had points of similarity. Laplace
developed his theory in detail with a mathematical precision beyond
Kant’s ability. At once it captured the imagination of the scientific
world; under the name of the nebular hypothesis it became the clas-
sical and accepted theory of the cosmos for more than a century.

Laplace theorized that the sun began as a vast heated nebula
consisting of gas which had acquired a rotary motion. He assumed
the nebula to be in a state of slow rotation around an 'axis. As
the gas gradually cooled it shrank and consequently whirled faster
and faster.

2^0 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Because of contraction this nebula of glowing gas became spheri-
cal in form. Rapid rotation of its equatorial belt, together with
other forces, caused the parental sun to eject at various stages great
rings of solar matter, leaving each ring behind as the shrinkage
of the mass continued. Each abandoned equatorial ring of gas
drifted from the parent sun and consolidated into a planet (a ring
was assumed for each of the planets) whose orbit around the sun
was the same as the ring from which it was formed, and whose
rotation was also from west to east. As the blazing parent globe
further contracted it ejected more rings, like the rings of Saturn,
until the sun left off shrinking and no more planets were bom.
Excess of rotation, according to Laplace, caused the sun to break
up and give birth to planets.

Laplace believed that through gravitational action each ring
collected itself into a globe and that these globes, like the main
mass, cooled, shrank, and rotated faster. If the ring was large enough,
one or more satellites evolved with the planet. The small spheres
cooled and solidified more rapidly than the larger bodies. After
the last ring was formed the remaining material became the sun—
that huge reservoir of heat and light, one and a quarter million
times the size of the earth.

According to the Laplacian hypothesis our earth was at first
hot and gaseous when it left the sun. Later it became liquid, though
still very hot, like slag in a blast furnace. By a further cooling
process the surface of the earth was formed, a cool crust over a
hot and liquid interior. In these early eons all the water, now in
the oceans and lakes, was pictured as a vast envelope of steam.
Later, as the earth continued to cool, the vapor gradually condensed,
forming oceans and rivers. As rivers began to flow, sands and muds
were carried down to the ocean. These river products later hard-
ened into sandstone and shale, and thereby gave birth to the first
sedimentary rocks resting on the original crust.

Because of the original hot and gaseous state of the earth the
early climates were naturally supposed to have been very hot and
moist. Later on, we shall see what an important factor the subject
of climate proved to be in arriving at a truer understanding of
,the earth’s origin. The cardinal point of the Laplacian doctrine,
. the idea of a cooling and contracting globe, supported the view that

CHAMBERLIN

the earth is constantly cooling and eventually will freeze. The
latest glacial period, the only one known to the followers of Laplace,
was thought to be proof of the progressive cooling of our planet.
His followers who elaborated upon his ideas pointed to the moon
as an illustration of what will be the ultimate end of earth. They
pictured a slow refrigeration process going on which will eventually
result in a frozen death for all.

The nebular hypothesis was in harmony with most of the facts
known a century and a half ago. As a theory it seemed both ample
and satisfying, for it offered a clear and easily comprehended ex-
planation of the origin of the solar system and our planet as a
part of it. Nothing captures the imagination and approval of people
quite so much as simplicity of explanation. This in a measure
accounts for the quick acceptance of Laplace’s views. But there was
also another reason. Laplace’s eminence as a man of learning (he
was a recognized mathematician and astronomer) conferred upon
his hypothesis wide approval and prestige. Its very boldness and
splendor seemed to be in keeping with his recognition as a consid-
erable man of affairs under Napoleon.

The nebular hypothesis represented the first clear scientific
formulation of the conception of cosmic evolution. It was indeed
a magnificent theory worthy of the profound mind that formu-
lated it. But the organization of the solar system is more complex
than it was believed to be in Laplace’s time. That his theory must
now be abandoned is not to deny its far-reaching influence and the
vast amount of good it did in destroying traditional biblical no-
tions along with the fantasies of classical antiquity. In its time it
was noonday glare upon the mental eyesight of those who saw only
the views of the Dark Ages. And even at this late date, surprising as
that may seem, there are people who have not yet got used to it.

Since the nebular hypothesis was formulated great progress has
been made in the accumulation of new facts. The outer moons of
Saturn and Uranus, quite unknown until long after Laplace’s death,
revolve in the opposite direction from that required by his theory.
A more complex planetary system than Laplace could have imag-
ined has come into view. In every braiich of science much that

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

was supposed to be true is now inadequate. Chemists, for example,
supposed the weight of a chlorine atom was 35.46 units until Aston
showed that chlorine atoms were a mixture of two kinds whose
weights are 35 and 37. Consequently, almost all deductions from
the old premise were right, but the premise itself was short of the
truth.

Likewise, in replacing Newton, Einstein has shown that we can
explain things better if we substitute other conceptions for those
of absolute space and absolute time. Similarly, an explanation called
the planetesimal theory (or hypothesis, for some would assign it
to this lower rank) has been developed to overcome Laplace. It is a
new theory, more in harmony with recent discoveries, and certainly
more in accord with very important mathematically demonstrated
laws. For an approach to the planetesimal theory we turn to the
life and work of an American theorist, Thomas Chrowder Cham-
berlin, bom on a farm near Mattoon, Illinois.

Chamberlin (1843-1928) began his scientific career when he be-
came professor of natural science at the State Normal School in
Whitewater, Wisconsin, in 1870. Here he remained two years when
he was called to accept the chair of geology at Beloit.

Like James Hutton who took an immediate interest in the coun-
try around Edinburgh, this youthful professor seized the opportunity
of studying the earth features in Wisconsin. Because it is a region
noted for its important glacial deposits, Chamberlin immediately
applied himself to the interesting problems at his front door. “I
was instrumental in starting the Wisconsin Geological Survey of
1869 and subsequent years. That was where I really started in sci-
ence. My field— eastern Wisconsin— was very heavily covered with
glacial formations, and as a matter of necessity I had to give much
attention, if not foremost attention, to glacial problems. This gave
me a trend in that direction, and naturally there arose in my mind
the question of the cause of so extraordinary a thing as the great
ice invasions.”

; ' The climatic conditions in past ages as revealed by traces of
ancient glaciers occupied much of the young professor’s thinking.
On the basis of the nebular hypothesis all early climates should

CHAMBERLIN

343

have been hot and very moist. Yet glacial deposits had been found
in pre-Cambrian rock nearly a billion years ago. Moreover, right
under his own nose in Wisconsin, Chamberlin found evidences of
very cold climates contrasting sharply with the climate of today.
How was one to explain all this?

At this point Chamberlin began to feel the inadequacy of La-
place’s views. Take such a fact as the Salt Range of India, where
extensive deposits of gypsum and salt have been found in strata
of the Cambrian period. Chamberlin asked himself how one could
reconcile a Laplacian moist earth swaddled by a dense vaporous
atmosphere from pole to pole with a great desert tract of this
sort? “Even more pointedly than the epochs of aridity,” he declared,
“do these early epochs of glaciation seem incompatible with the
view of a hot earth universally wrapped in a vaporous mantle in
early times.”

It must not be thought that in the formative stages of his theo-
rizing Chamberlin immediately discarded Laplace. On the contrary,
he made every effort to believe the nebular hypothesis. Only after
a long drawn out intellectual battle did he finally abandon it, and
then not lightly but only after innumerable attempts to twist it this
way and that so that at least it could be brought up to date, in other
words, modified. Exactly the same thing happened to the Ptolemaic
theory. Before it was finally overthrown it had undergone a score
of modifications. But it was all useless and in vain because science,
in sifting out facts, spares nothing, not even sacred traditions, for
science has its own sacred tradition of the open mind.

Once he became convinced that all was not right with the La-
placian view he pushed his studies more eagerly until he had at
his fingers’ tips a mass of evidence ranging through the entire
known sweep of geological times. We find him in iSyS studying
the glaciers of Switzerland, gathering additional data, and then in
Greenland in 1894 when he accompanied Peary on his polar ex-
pedition. Always a man to assume responsibilities, Chamberlin now
took on the added task of assistant state geologist while professor
at Beloit. That was in 1873. In 1877 he was made chief. Four
volumes entitled The Geology of Wisconsin contain the results of
an exhaustive geological survey of the whole state made by him an<I
his associates. • '■

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

344

From Beloit, Chamberlin went to Washington, D. C., where he
became head o£ the division o£ glacial geology established by the
government in recognition o£ his able work in Wisconsin. In 1887
he was elected to the presidency o£ the University of Wisconsin,
a post he held with distinction for four years until he resigned
to become head of the department of geology in the new University
of Chicago. Happy to be relieved of pressing administrative duties,
he turned the whole force of his powerful intellect upon the prob-
lems of the origin of the earth. His first nonglacial paper entitled
A Group of Hypotheses Bearing on Climatic Changes appeared in
1897. Out of this paper came the planetesimal theory.

Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The
positive and demonstrable knowledge of one generation is trans-
mitted to another. That the planetesimal theory of Chamberlin’s
is able to tell us more about the origin of our planet is due not
only to those who pioneered before Chamberlin but also to the
collaboration of his colleague at the University of Chicago, Pro-
fessor Forest Ray Moulton, the astronomer. In an interview pub-
lished in 1928 in the Open Court Magazine shortly before he died
Chamberlin tells the story of his co-operative venture with Moulton.
It is remarkably interesting. “One day I happened to meet Moulton
on the campus. I had had some acquaintance with him and he had
been helpful in some things before. He was then a young instructor
or graduate student. So I put it up to him. . . . That was the be-
ginning of our co-operative work, and perhaps I may be pardoned
for saying that it was a rather unusual combination in that field.
Moulton, you see, was strong on celestial mechanics and on
mathematics, whereas I was a naturalist. I worked from the earth;
Laplace and Kant and all those men had been working from the
heavens— working down. . . . While Moulton and I worked in
close co-operation we worked independently; yet we so depended
upon each other that it is a joint work, and that is the way the
public should understand it.”

At the outset of this exposition of the planetesimal theory it must
be emphasized that the shift from Laplace to Chamberlin has in no
way invalidated the idea of solar evolution— nor does it do away

CHAMBERLIN

345

with the suggestion, that the solar system has originated from a
nebula. Rather to the contrary, the new theory has strengthened
these views and has put them on a firmer footing than was the case
before. Whereas the Laplacian theory holds that the sun broke up
through excess of rotation, the planetesimal view maintains that
this could not have happened. Actually, the birth of the planets
was due to two forces (like father and mother): the gravitational
effect of a passing star (father), which acted in conjunction with
the eruptive powers of the sun (mother).

Unlike the nebular theory, the new one is based on numerous
physical laws which have been discovered in recent years. In place
of the concept of a solar system evolved from an evenly diffused gas
the Chamberlin theory sees it evolved from irregularly scattered
matter of various kinds (planetesimals), some of it solid and some
gaseous. This material is derived from a body already in existence,
called the ancestral sun, because it once contained the material now
distributed among the several planets and satellites.

The planetesimal theory holds that at the initial stage in the
development of our solar system the ancestral sun, which had
existed for billions of years, was disrupted and partly torn by the
gravitational effect of a passing star. Vast quantities of solar mate-
rial were thrown out of the sun, not only because of the gravita-
tional pull of the passing star, but also because of the expulsive
power of the sun itself. The near collision (near in the astronomi-
cal sense) raised great tides in the hot gaseous surface of the sun just
as the moon now raises tides in the oceans of the earth.

Much of the matter ejected or pulled out of these tides fell back
into the sun— especially after the visiting star had gone its way.
But some of the particles having sufficient velocity streamed away
in opposite directions and continued on in a great variety of orbits.

It is known that the stars in our galaxy are moving in diverse
directions so that it would indeed seem strange if no close en-
counter had ever taken place in past astronomical ages. Despite
the vast distances that separate stars, such near approaches are be-
lievable. No other way has been discovered whereby the sun or
any other star by itself can develop a planetary system. An outside
agency is needed. To produce this result the close approach of an-

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

346

other star is required, sufficiently close to exercise a gravitational
effect such as Chamberlin’s theory supposes.*

A French astronomer named Roche made in 1850 a very notable
estimate of what would happen if two stars of unequal size ap-
proached each other within a distance of about two and a half radii.
Roche showed that the power of gravitation would be sufficient to
tear the structure of the smaller body to pieces. The two and a half
radii (more exactly 2.44) is known to astronomy as Roche’s limit.

Let us now suppose that these two stars approach each other
at an angle that does not come within the explosive area of Roche’s
limit but dangerously near enough to exert a mutual tidal strain
of tremendous power. What happens then? The effect of such
proximity would be to raise gigantic tides, vast eruptions of gaseous
substance, on each of the stars. As a result large quantities of this
stellar stuff would be shot into space. The sudden increase in bril-
liancy of some stars is supposed to be due to collision— hence the
postulated interference of a star with the ancestral sun is not only
possible but reasonable. The star need not actually strike the sun
in order to tear it to pieces and scatter the fractured material; in
fact, a head-on collision probably would not produce the rotary
motion possessed by the solar system.

Studies of the behavior of the sun reveal it as a turbulent body
hurling enormous masses of flaming solar matter to great heights
beyond its edges. The material which is so constantly shot out is,
of course, pulled back into the sun by the gravitational attraction
of the sun. In order to overcome this pull some force from the out-
side would have to co-operate as an agency in creating a situation
strong enough to prevent the homeward return of the eruptive solar
material. Only the force of a passing star can be imagined as capable
of (a) pulling out of the sun larger masses than are now being
erupted from its surface, and (b) making them pursue paths of their
own around the sun. Our solar system, with respect to its momen-
tum, is a very curious affair. The sun rotates slowly in contrast to
the swift speed of the planets as they circle it. Of the total momen-
tum of the solar system, the planets possess 97 percent. Thus the

•In recent years astronomers have suggested that planetary systems might
• originate when an unstable star bursts and we have a “nova.” No theory is as
yet able to state iii detaiil how bur solar system originated.

CHAMBERLIN 34'7

rotational momentum of the system as a whole is concentrated in
the major planets. But the mass resides in the sun. Actually, the
total mass of the planets is less than one percent of the mass of
the sun. Such a system cannot be imagined to have arisen from
within the sun itself by gradual evolutionary changes. The only
answer is that some exterior agency caused this kind of situation—
that is, some catastrophic action capable, by its great violence, of
conferring upon the newly formed planets a much greater mo-
mentum than the sun’s.

According to Chamberlin’s theory the earth began its career as
a comparatively small cold mass. This small original mass consti-
tuted the core of the earth to be. From time to time this original
mass received additions of scattered fragments, large and small, solid
and gaseous. All these additions ranging in size from infinitesimal
particles to great masses are called planetesimals. This view rejects
Laplace’s idea of the earth’s having been at one time a fiery or
molten ball. (The high interior temperature of the earth is doubt-
less due to impact and compression.)

“The earth,” declares Chamberlin, “grew up slowly, and hence
when falling bodies struck the atmosphere they became hot but
were cold by the time others fell on them; so the earth grew up
from the infall of these planetesimals in a relatively cool way and
never was molten, never was all gas. All the time it was growing up
very slowly— say a billion years or so in growing up— without being
very hot.” Chamberlin emphatically states that the molten globe
idea with the floating crust is a misinterpretation of the facts, which
are: that the earth is solid, has always been solid, has grown up
as a mass of little solid particles, and that these have worked upon
one another. “There is internal reorganziation going on all the
time, and that is the explanation of our earth movements or earth-
quakes, and all of that. Thus we get a very different concept of the
great things in geology.”

The planet Mars is about one-tenth the size of earth and pos-
sesses a thin atmosphere. Chamberlin conjectures that in all proba-
bility our planet was originally like Mars both as to size and atmos-
phere. As the earth grew by gathering in, planetesimals, it acquired
more mass and therefore more atmosphere. “Quite in contrast with
the older pictures of a primitive earth; cooling; from a gaseous state.

348 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

the planetesimal hypothesis postulates a solid earth growing up
slowly by accessions and becoming clothed gradually with an at-
mosphere and a hydrosphere. Each of the fundamental parts, the
earth, the air and the water, is made to grow up thus together from
smaller to larger volumes, without necessarily attaining at any state
a very high temperature.”

Like our earth, all the planets grew from swarms of planetesimals,
around a more or less solid nucleus, instead of condensing from
a very hot and greatly expanded gaseous ring. Due to perpetual
meteoric bombardment physical and chemical forces have generated
the heat in the earth’s interior. (Meteors, supposedly belated frag-
ments of the original tearing of the ancestral sun, are swept into
our earth at the rate of something like a hundred million each day!)
The Laplacian theory could never quite explain the planetoids. In
the Chamberlin view they are simply large planetesimals that did
not chance to lie near a larger mass or nucleus. Hence they have
thus far remained isolated like those myriads of yet smaller frag-
ments of sun-substance called meteorites.

The evident superiority of the planetesimal theory over the
nebular hypothesis leads one to think that its acceptance would have
been rapid. Not at all. Theories like theological dogmas fade
slowly and nexv concepts take generations to become popular. Cham-
berlin recognized this. “I feel the greatest confidence that this new
view of the earth is going to win, because it is built up from the
earth, as it were, but it is going to be slow. I said at the start to
Salisbury and some others that it will be twenty-five years before
the planetesimal hypothesis will come fairly before the world. The
twenty-five years are not quite up,* but perhaps twenty-five years
was a litde scant. However, I think by the end of twenty-five years
there will be a rather decided opinion on the part of those who
really do the thinking.”

It takes a philosopher to say these things and Chamberlin was
not only geologically minded but philosophically geared to the
cosmos. He held to a strong belief in the future not only on scien-

: • This, was wd in shortly before he died.

CHAMBERLIN

349

tific grounds, as we shall soon see, but also on moral grounds. “I
am an advocate of a great future,” he once said and declared that
this thought was the gist of his famous Boston address of Decem-
ber 27, 1909, when he retired from the presidency of The American
Association for the Advancement of Science. It is unquestionably
a powerful document delivered by an intellectual giant in terms
so simple that to read it is a delight.

To the followers of Laplace who have visualized a dying earth
Chamberlin sketched the view that present geological conditions
are likely to last for possibly hundreds of millions of years yet
to come. The very title of his Boston paper illustrates this point
of view; A Geologic Forecast of the Future Opportunities of Our
Race. He was convinced that the earth sciences give a new forecast
to mankind because “the history of the earth stretches back not
merely for thousands but for millions and tens of millions of years;
that the on-goings of the earth are actuated by energies too broad
and deep and strong to be swerved in their course.”

It is now just ten years since Chamberlin died. The past decade
which has seen a worldwide depression in economic affairs has, by
contrast, been witness to a fruitful period of scientific advance. At
Chicago where Chamberlin worked, his son Professor Rollin T.
Chamberlin is carrying on. At Harvard, Yale, Columbia— in fact,
at every leading university— geologists in conjunction with other
men of science are building on the foundations of the planetesimal
theory. So completely did Chamberlin predict the success of his
theory that it can be safely said that there is not a single author-
ity in either geology or astronomy who now accepts the nebular
hypothesis.

In recent years two British scientists. Sir James Jeans and Doctor
Harold Jeffreys, have advanced certain views which would seem
to carry the subject of the origin of our earth somewhat beyond
the work of Chamberlin and Moulton. Their views are called the
tidal theories. They deviate in detail and method rather than in
principle. In fact, the planetesimal theory could have been much
better called the tidal-disruption hypodiesis, because its central
thesis is that of the close encounter of .a star and the sun. This is
the pivotal idea of the theory that markf it off so completely from

ggo ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

that of Laplace’s. While the planetesimal view supposes that the
existing planets were formed mainly by the slow agglomeration of
s rn^b cold bodies, the Jeans-Jeffreys view claims they were all once
liquid with about the same mass that they now possess, having
picked up much less solar matter in later times. Jeans and Jeffreys
rest their case more on tidal forces whereas the Chamberlin theory
employs both tidal forces and the internal forces of the sun.

Both theories agree that the planets originated from the sun,
that they are products of a solar catastrophe incited by the passing
of another body near the sun, and that the planets represent the
debris of this disaster that occurred millions of years ago.

THEORY OF MAN

none is more debaucmng man mose aecpiy louucu supcistiLiuua un
the subject of race. In recent years a worldwide tidal wave of race
consciousness, ill-founded and preposterous, has engulfed humanity,
with the unfortunate result that its weird and vulgar prejudices
have achieved an ascendancy over the minds of whole nations.

The current furore over race is a fixation of ardent nationalism
and self-importance. Apparently there is no field of knowledge
where ignorance is more complacent, cruelty more rampant and
dogmatism more arrogant. It is a region of vast mystification in
whirh the half-civilized majority of mankind lives and has its

Through the combined efforts of the theory ot evotuuon anu
the theo^ of the cell scientists achieved a new understanding. No
longer could man’s origin be viewed in terms of the primitive
Hebrew account of special creation as set forth in the Book of
Genesis. In the seventeenth century it was possible for the Rev-
erend Doctor John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, to
declare that “man was created by the Trinity on October 23, 4004
B.C., at nine o’clock in the morning.” With the growth of scientific
u herame evident that man was not made m a single

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

352

species, through long centuries of slow evolutionary change, was
an idea remote from their thoughts. Then in 1859 Darwin’s
classical book appeared, Origin of Species. It proved to be a vol-
canic shock forcing the old biblical theory to undergo a severe
and thorough overhauling. This venerable Scriptural misconception
of man, which had been dominant for more than two thousand
years, finally yielded to evolution.

Coincident with the work of Darwin, those biologists who were
investigating the cell made it utterly impossible for man to be
regarded any longer as the Great Exception, a creature unrelated
to the animal world. Considering that the fundamental structural
unit in man, as in all other organisms, is the cell, there was no
escaping his kinship. Animals composed of a single cell are termed
protozoa, those possessing many cells are called metazoa. Man is a
metazoan whose body is linked to the animal world by an all-
pervading similitude of structure. Consider the great number of
points shared by man with the apes and monkeys. Like them he is
a mammal because he possesses mammary glands and hair and has
the thoracic cavity, containing the heart and the lungs, separated
from the abdominal cavity by a complete diaphragm. Like his
fellow-primates, man’s eyes are directed forward so that he can
have stereoscopic vision; his fingers and toes are of five digits and,
like them, he possesses fiat nails and no claws. Thus, man’s kinship
with animal life indicates his ascent from lower forms— his in-
heritance being the outcome of prehuman ages. The doctrine of
the strict natal continuity between all forms of life, far from be-
ing a degrading thought (as most people believed in the early days
of Darwinian controversy), shows that man is a scion of an order
of living creatures which moved in the direction of improved brains.
Moreover, by the time man appears on the outermost edge of his-
tory he had already left the other animals a long way behind.

It is no mere accident that anthropology is one of the youngest
of the sciences. It had to wait until the knowledge of the cell and
the knowledge of evolution could be formulated and applied to
man. The aftermath of Schwann and Darwin created anthropology.

As we have; seen, the story of all . science is the story of intense

BOAS

353

struggle in the face of bitter opposition, for people have persistently
viewed natural phenomena through a veil of mysticism and super-
stition. Was not Socrates attacked for impiety because he taught
that the clouds were mechanical emanations and not divine persons?
The physical sciences had to put up a long and continuous war-
fare against the dogmas of theology. Yet their struggle is not com-
parable to tlie battles the social sciences had to wage and are still
waging on all fronts.

Chemistry, physics, astronomy are removed from the ordinary
emotional affairs of the man in the street. But not the science of
man himself. To attempt to investigate man impartially— his origin,
his body, his nature, his nurture— is to challenge cherished and
jealously guarded beliefs. This was clearly exemplified in Germany
where the great majority of the members of various anthropologi-
cal societies, led by no less a person than Rudolf Virchow (1821-
1902), took up an attitude of critical hostility toward Darwin. The
Descent of Man was regarded as fantastic. Not only w^as the book
rejected, but in certain quarters even the very discussion of it was
forbidden.

The educated public today commands a picture of man which
stands as a correction of a great and long-enduring error. That
error was born of a noble religious teaching handed down from
the early days of Hebrew-Christian theology.

Both the church and the synagogue were interested in man, but
in man whose origin and nature are “revealed” in the Scriptures. As
the fundamental notions of these great theologies were crystallized
centuries before the rise of modem science, it is understandable
that they could not set man in proper perspective. The Hebrew-
Christian theory was dominated by four errors: (a) that man was
created by a special act of God, (b) that there is no linkage be-
tween him and the animal kingdom, (c) that man’s presence on
earth is the supreme act in the great drama of the universe of
which the earth is the fixed center, and (d) that certain peoples
are the elect of the Deity and therefore superior to others. The
first two errors were destroyed by the theory of evolution and the
theory of the cell. The third dogma was made untenable by astron-
omy. And the fourth by anthropology.

354

architects of ideas

Existing man constitutes a single biological species-Ho mo
sapiens. Excavations and discoveries have unearthed skulls and
bones of extinct varieties, such as Pithecanthropus or mm,

Palaeanthropus or Heidelberg man, Eoanthropus or Piltdown man.
These fossil remains (more than a hundred are now known) give
a fairly complete knowledge of those bygone creatures allied to
existing man. They all belonged to Hominidae, thm is, to the hu-
man family of which modern man, Homo sapiens, is now the only

"^"^Hom^slptns makes up a single species. In other wo^s, men of
all existing races belong to one and the same grouping. To be sure,
there exist in this grouping many striking differences, but despite
these differences fertile interbreeding is possible between all mem-
bers. Take, for example, four widely separated individuals-a Ger-
man blond, an African pigmy, an American Indian, a Chinese;
they are mutually fertile. This admittedly is a fact distasteful to
many upholders of the dogmas of superiority and “pure race

Because all men are of one kind (species) it is correct to say
“mankind.” We could not as properly speak of fish-kind or insect-
kind or bird-kind. It is probable that during the very early evolu-
tion of Homo the species became divided, owing to geographica
and climatic conditions, into several varieties-white, black, yellow
-each more or less isolated from the other and each evolving along
those lines that would best suit it or adapt it to its own particular
environment. Throughout the entire history of Homo, which covers
several hundred thousand years, there have been many modihca-
tions-in stature, skin, color, head form, eyes, nose-but none so
complete or enduring as to break up the species. ^

Despite the enormous progress made by the science of anthro-
pology, there is no other subject in which people are so wont to
L up their private and illogical judgments. With the best inten-
tions it is difficult to look at man and his works with candor and
detachment. Unable to assess properly the evolutionary point o
view, people have long distrusted this branch of science as a body
of knowledge essentially hostile to man’s good opinion of himsel .
They have recoiled at the view of his lowly origin, as if dignity is
not actually heightened by his upward biological journey.

BOAS

355

The attitude toward man, unintelligent as it was (and still is!),
has not been nearly so harmful as the so-called popular attitude
towards race. Here the fiction of “superiority,” which seems to be
universally shared by all peoples, has found such a complete lodge-
ment in men’s minds that any tendency to dethrone it immediately
fans fierce flames of ancient and modem prejudices. Not even the
decline in supernaturalism and divine sanctions has been sufficient
to overthrow it.

In 1492 Columbus discovered America and soon thereafter the
sea routes to Asia were opened. Very quickly a piecemeal knowl-
edge of new lands and new peoples was spread over Europe. Those
vast expeditions of discovery and exploitation, which carved out
huge colonial empires, made the masses of Europeans conscious of
so-called racial differences.

Of course, the knowledge gathered about strange peoples in
remotely different places proved tremendously fascinating, but it
was far from being a true scientific report. Europeans were out to
conquer native tribes; consequently, all that they said about them
was colored by the crass interests of exploitation. Moreover, they set
themselves up as ruling aristocracies. Since any white man was a
member of the ruling group, it followed that the black- or brown- or
red-skinned man became a member of the subject group. Both sides
became increasingly conscious of their physical differences. Espe-
cially did the African slave trade stimulate this feeling.

From the outset, Europeans attempted to rationalize the situa-
tion and to assure themselves by devious methods of logic that
the subjugation of foreign racial groups was both natural and in-
evitable. As early as 1517 a member of the royal council in Spain
suggested that Indians were too low in the scale of humanity to
be capable of embracing the Catholic faith. Indians were declared
to be of unsound mind and hence unable to own property or
to exercise true sovereignty. The Spaniards insisted on consider-
ing the natives brutish animals (bruta animalia). Nor was this atti-
tude confined to Spaniards. English, French and Dutch masters
adopted a similar attitude. For example, we find Samuel Sewall at
the beginning of the eighteenth century, when he was a judge of the
Superior Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony, noting dqwn in his

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

356

diary that he had “essayed to prevent Negroes and Indians being
rated as cattle, but could not succeed.” The Puritans, on the whole,
considered the Indians and Negroes accursed savages who might
properly be destroyed or enslaved. “We know not when or how
these Indians first became inhabitants of the mighty continent, yet
we may guess that probably the Devil decoyed these miserable sav-
ages hither in hope that the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would
never come to destroy or disturb his absolute empire over them.”
So preached Cotton Mather. Thus the power of the sword was but-
tressed by the sanctions of religion. Because Europeans were mem-
bers of the “Christian race,” it seemed natural that God should re-
ward his owm. With such prejudices a systematic and accurate
understanding of native peoples was impossible. The unfortunate
results of these early misconceptions are at the base of much con-
temporary confusion.

When the supernatural sanctions of “racial” dominance began
to lose their force, the Whites quickly developed other rationaliza-
tions to justify their scramble for colonies among the so-called
backward peoples. A number of English writers seized upon the
concept of ultimate destiny: they visualized the “Anglo-Saxon race”
as destined to inhabit and civilize the whole world. In his Last
Will and Testament Cecil Rhodes, in a rhapsody of race-thinking,
declared for “the furtherance of the British Empire for the bring-
ing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule, for the
recovery of the United States, for the making of the Anglo-Saxon
race but one empire. What a dream! But yet it is probable. It is
possible.”

Of the many people who have passionately believed in the supe-
riority of the white race none has exerted as profound an influence,
or has played as important a role among the idees-forces of our
modern world, as the French journalist and diplomat. Count Arthur
de Gobineau (1816-1882). Perhaps no other book on race has had
such a tremendous influence, as did his Essai sur I’enegalite des races
humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races). What Karl
Marx’s Das Kapital has meant to communists, Gobineau’s Essai has
meant to race-dogmatists. It was published in Paris in two volumes
between the .years 1853-55. , . , / : ,

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357

Gobineau was born in Bordeaux, the last scion of a well-to-do
family. From the early days of his career he was in revolt against
all things bourgeois. With a few kindred souls he formed a group
who called themselves Scelti— the Chosen— to promote aristocratic
ideas. Gobineau was unquestionably an able and many-sided man
—poet, artist, novelist, diplomat, politician, journalist, sculptor,
traveler— but his mind was pervaded with a disgaist for democracy
and a hatred of humanity which can be traced in the forty volumes
he has left us. The Essai, however, was inspired by Gobineau’s re-
searches begun on his own family tree; and by his own admission
’ it was written in part to prove the superiority of his own race.

Simply put, Gobineau argued that the white race— the Aryan— is
; superior to all other races, and of the Aryans (of which Gobineau
; passionately believed he was a member) the Germans are the purest

! modern representatives. He was among the first to call the Latin

races decadent. Of the population of his own country, Gobineau
declared that the vast masses were racially a Gallo-Roman mob
“whose chief instinct is envy and revolution.” He deplored the fact
that France has only a few Aryan Nordics.

The foundation of Gobineau’s system is the classification and
characterization of the races. He divides mankind into three races:
the black, which represents passion, is animal-like and capricious,
yet possessed of lyricism and the artistic temperament; the yellow,
which represents mediocrity, is stubborn and apathetic, but is gifted
with a sense of order and a sense of practicality; the white, which
possesses godlike reason and honor, excels in all things. Particu-
larly does it excel in physical beauty. “The peoples who are not
of white blood approach beauty but do not attain it.” As regards
physical strength Gobineau said, “We shall have to give the palm
to those who belong to the white race.”

Although Gobineau was a Frenchman, it was in Germany that
his theories caught on and spread. In France, Gobineau was not at
any time too popular; but across the Rhine it was a different story.
After the war of 1870 Gobineau made the friendship of Richard
Wagner to whom the ideas of the Essai appealed. Finding in the
Count a kindred spirit, Wagner f^ted him at Wahnfried. To seal the
friendship, Wagner inscribed to Gobineau his complete prose works.
Largely as a result of the great musician’s enthusiastic support

ARGHITECTS OF IDEAS

358

Gobineau societies sprang up all over Germany. It was a happy
day in the Count’s life when his daughter married Baron von
Guldencrone.

Gobineau’s racial theory furnished a simple explanatory key
whereby one could construct a grand and sweeping philosophy of
history. “I have become convinced,” declared Gobineau with strong
dogmatic emphasis, “that everything in the way of human creation,
science, art, civilization, all that is great and noble and fruitful .

on earth, points to a single source, is sprung from one and the
same root, belongs only to one family, the various branches of
which have dominated every civilized region of the world.” This
one family, Gobineau revealed, is none other than the Aryan race.

All civilization originally sprang from the virile qualities of Aryans,
and wherever civilization declines it is because Aryan blood has
been bastardized by intermarriage. With the admixture of bloods
Aryans always lose their sense of aristocracy and also their high
consciousness of race superiority. This then opens the way for ,

decadence and degeneracy which insist on equality— that is, democ- j

racy. Although “the white race originally possessed the monopoly !

of beauty, intelligence and strength, by its union with other varie- j

ties hybrids were created, which were beautiful without strength, j

strong without intelligence, or, if intelligent, both weak and ugly.” i

Thus Gobineau’s explanation is simplicity itself. Why do civiliza- I

tions rise? Because of Aryan blood. Why do they fall? Because that I

blood is contaminated by foreign elements. Hitler has taken these i

chapters to heart. i

There is a platitude in logic that a man can prove anything if
he selects his evidence and uses it to bolster his theory. Take the
case, for example, of the good bishop who stood for the first time
on Mount Sinai and solemnly ejaculated: “Now I know that Moses
wrote the Pentateuch.” Patient investigation and dependable evi-
dence had nothing to do with his ecstatic outburst. In a sweep
of ecstasy akin to that of the bishop, Gobineau stood one day on
an islet in the North Sea, one of the Skaeren, and felt a “mystic
conviction” that his remote ancestors originated on this tiny pine-
fringed rock. Although the Count was brown-haired with golden
brown eyes, this did not prevent him from actually believing that
he was a Nor dic-A.ryan; descended from Ottar Jarl, a Viking hero.

BOAS

By the close of the nineteenth century, Gobinism had become
a powerful cult with important adherents. A supreme Germany
peopled by blond geniuses was a tempting ideal to which few
compatriots resisted homage. Books now began to appear, filled
with extravagance and bombast and supported by all manner of
special pleading. This literature is notorious for its disregard of
fact. But such defects apparently make little difference when the
will to believe gains momentum and respectability. Richard Wag-
ner became an ardent disciple of Gobinism and added a few ele-
ments of his own Wagnerian mysticism, Friefirich Nietzsche was
greatly influenced. Theodor Poesche and Professor Carl Penka lent
a desired note. Poesche said that the true Aryans were tall, fair-

359

Thus Gobineau could not only quote Scripture for bis purposes
but he was extraordinarily facile in inventing his own passages. He
stretched, warped, distorted and created evidence to his own liking,
and then permeated the whole with the mysticism of pseudo science
which the Germans hungrily absorbed. That the supreme race is
the Aryan and the Teutons are its modern wonder-working repre-
sentatives was most palatable to the Germans embarking upon an
ambitious career of exploitation and conquest. The fact that noth-
ing was known scientifically of an Aryan race, that its supposed
existence was a purely hpothetical construction, apparently never
troubled these dogmatists.

Among those who are without knowledge of the merits and
demerits of opposing theories, the one which is understood with
the least effort is the one most likely to gain acceptance. Gobineau’s
contribution in elaborating these Aryan concepts into the Teutonic
myth was a considerable factor in the growth of Germany’s race
vanity, chiming in beautifully with the aspirations of the leaders
of Pan-Germanism. It is amusing to note, however, that Gobineau
on numerous occasions denied the identity of the heroic Germans
or Teutons (les Germains) with the modem Germans {les AUe-
mands). He even placed the German people below the French in
racial value because he thought them more mixed. To the many
contradictions in Gobineau’s writings the Germans paid slight
heed. The Gobineau societies flourished.

300 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

skinned, blue-eyed and heavily bearded. By nature these people,
claimed Poesche, were instinctively Protestant, while the shorter
and darker folk were submissive and instinctively Catholic.

Gobinism reached its high point in Houston Stewart Chamber-
lain (1855-1927), who wrote The Foundation of the Nineteenth
Centwy, a volume of offensive muddlement which made its ap-
pearance in Germany in 1899. Chamberlain like Gob ineau was
a poet-musician-philosopher. Although born in England of aris-
tocratic parents, he found Germany much more inviting, and he
preferred to live and write in that country— and deify its people.
He became an enthusiastic follower of Wagner, whose daughter
he married, and was a member of the Gobineau society. Chamber-
lain’s writings were so popular with the ruling class in Germany
that he became known as the Kaiser’s anthropologist.

His work rests on the assumptions of Gobineau, strengthened
with additional Aryan material which had been accumulated by
lesser Aryanists. Chamberlain wrote with the fire and fanaticism
of a prophet. No “cold” scientific facts ever stood in his way. After
all, what is science compared to the poetic prophecy of Germany’s
racial greatness? Despite the size and cost of his books, their sales
ran into the scores of thousands. Kaiser Wilhelm was so pleased
with them that he made a special appropriation to encourage their
wide distribution.

Also like Gobineau, Chamberlain is not quite certain what the
Aryans are. Such a minor fact, however, never limits his lyrical
descriptions of their qualities, nor his poetic conviction that the
Germans are the purest form of Aryans. Often Chamberlain is
sorely troubled, but he always finds a solution in using intuition
as a guide. This he calls rational anthropology. Intuition told him
that Dante, a brunet, was unmistakably Teuton, as was the round-
headed Martin Luther, since both their countenances reflect the
“vitality” and the “soul power” of the German spirit. By the same
method of reasoning, he found that Jesus was an Aryan— as were
Peter and Paul. With such divination at his command Chamber-
lain produced his own proofs and criteria of race. Still, he never
ventured to define race; in a moment of rhapsody, he declared,
“Whoever reveals himself German by his acts, whatever be his
genealogical tree^ is a German.” Despite its manifest contradictions

BOAS

361

Chamberlain’s book endeared itself to the German people and
added glow to their myth of superiority. It was useful propaganda
for keeping Germans conscious of their own worth.

After Chamberlain, a score of boastful race dogmatists emerged
who pulled and mauled Gobinism to fit their divergent doctrines.
Never have ideas been subjected to such torturing manipulation
in order to make them fit the Procrustean bed. There was, for
example, Ludwdg Woltmann (1871-1907), a man of romantic and
mystical temperament whose ideas were singularly impervious to
fact or logic. In his youth he transferred his allegiance from Rous-
seau to Marx, but he finally succumbed to the ideologies of the
Gobineau cult and the doctrine of the superiority of the tall blond
German. Before his death by drowning he had written some sixty
articles and three books.

Woltmann’s contribution was to prove that world-famous per-
sonalities, no matter what the world thought or their records proved,
were Teutons. His method was simplicity itself, a childishly naive
formula: a single Teutonic trait was sufficient to classify one with
the Teuton aristocracy. Following the clue of the blue eye, the
blond hair and the long head he “proved” that the Italian Giotto
was originally the German Jothe; Tasso was Basse, Leonardo da
Vinci was Wincke, and Bruno was Braun. Similarly, the Spaniard
Velasquez was originally Velahise, Murillo was Moerl and Vaz was
Watz. The great Frenchmen, Aronet, Diderot and Gounod were
to be pronounced Arwid, Tietroth and Gundiwald. Curious jug-
leryl When a man is out to prove his own particular brand of race
theory, he will often indulge in gross absurdities. It is like that
doctor who diagnosed a patient’s disease as alcholic poison. “But I
have been a teetotaller all my life,” protested the patient. The doc-
tor was puzzled. At length he asked, “Where do you work? In a
brewery,” was the reply. “Ah!” said the doctor, ‘you take it in
through the pores of your skin.”

These strutting race concepts, with tendencies to state-worship
and mass-enthusiasm, continued straight through the World War,
as can be seen in Otto Hauser’s Der Blonde Mensch (1921), and in
Hans Gunther’s Rassenkunde des Deutschen Volkes (1923). giving
rise to a host of ludicrous ideas and preposterous statements. Pan-

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Germanism became the doctrine of race egotism run riot.* It is
revealing to note that these concepts of race vanity had been so
deeply forced into the consciousness of the German people that
despite the terrific setbacks of 1914-1918 it was possible for the
Third Reich to loose upon the German people a biand of Gobineau
Aryanism that has become the world s most monumental preach-
ment against democracy.

In the United States, Gobinism was slightly rehashed to make
it more palatable to the Americans. The clearest expiession of this
tendency is the voice of Madison Grant. His two books. The Passing
of the Great Race (1916) and The Conquest of a Continent (1933),
take up arms in favor of the Nordics. The warning is sounded
by Grant-himself, of course, a member of the great race-that the
danger in America lies in the “gradual dying out among our people
of those hereditary traits through which the principles of our reli-
gious, political or social foundations were laid down, and their
insidious replacement by traits of less noble character. In recent
years the Nordic concept has been advanced in the United States
with almost religious zeal. The latest expression of the phobia is
a book entitled We Northmen (1936) by Lucien Price.

Unfortunately for Mr. Grant his Nordic myth of a fair, tall,
and long-headed race of early Americans was rudely upset by Ales
Hrdlicka of the United States National Museum at Washington
in a book called The Old Americans (1925), which showed by care-
ful examination that the early colonists were mostly round-headed
and dark or medium in complexion. Similarly, Havelock Ellis in
A Study of British Genius (1928) presented facts hostile to this
myth. For example, in studying exploration Ellis showed that hardly
any of the great British explorers were of the Nordic type. It is
extremely interesting to note that some of the greatest men Ger-
many produced were not long-headed but moderately, and in some
cases extremely, round-headed. One could name Kant, Goethe,
Schiller and Beethoven.

Other groups too have been busy in this process of race exaltation.
Giuseppe Sergi (1841- ), the Italian anthropologist, has shown in

a series of publications that the Mediterranean race-of which he

' J • Gunther is the official anthropologist of the Nazi regime. Hitler had him

; appointed professor at '

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363

I is a member— is the rightful carrier of the “true” civilization, that
I the Germans and the Asiatics only destroyed what the Mediter-
I raneans had created. Sergi contradicts Woltmann by an actual study
of Dante’s bones and finds that Dante represents the most authentic
and glorious type of the Mediterranean stock, truly Italian in blood,
short and dark in physical characteristics. (Sergi is the anthropolo-
gist who thought that the blonde Nordics are bleached Negioes
i who came out of Africa!)

^ Various types of “proofs” have been utilized to uphold this or
: that doctrine of superiority. “Proofs” have been found in the oc-

currence of long-heads and broad-heads, blue eyes and dark eyes,
degrees of pigmentation, tallness and shortness, brain and blood—
not to overlook such things as soul, astronomy, climate, intuition,
spirit. On the whole, these proofs have been nothing more than
arguments to the crowd for praising or damning without the trou-
■ ble of going into a detailed analysis. Together they represent not
science but a cartoon of science.

Consider for a moment the so-called proof of blood. It is a good
illustration of error in thinking about races and peoples. The
fiction of blood stems from a mistake of Aristotle. So great was
1 Aristotle’s influence that the conclusion of much medieval discus-
I sion was simply: “Aristotle hath said it.” Because of his prestige

! it took centuries to batter down the theory of the four elements.

The Aristotelian obstruction in chemistry was matched by his
errors in biology. Blood is one of them. The world had to wait
a long time before the ceil theory and the science of embryology
conclusively proved that Aristotle’s blood doctrine was wrong. To-
day, we know that there is no continuum of blood between parent
and offspring; for no blood passes from the mother to the child in
her womb. Inheritance is transmitted only by the genes in the
chromosomes.

How then did Aristotle make this biological eixor? He believed
that the menstrual periods of a woman, which do not appear during
pregnancy, contributed to the growth of the embryo. Among un-
tutored people the fiction of blood is still quite strong. Obviously,
the doctrine is not science. Its only place is in a museum of errors.

So much for this one proof. Taken together these various proofs
have been made the theme of the most dismal twaddle that has

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

364

deluged the world since the days of medieval scholasticism. Were it
not that these proofs waste reckless quantities of ink and blood they
could be ignored as the babble of fanatics.

In this maze of tangled thoughts, of theories and counter-theories,
the rvork of a few men has stood out. The leader of this group is a
scientist with no theory of superiority to uphold. He is the recog-
nized authority on race. The impartial, objective investigation of
this question is new, so new that it is bound up with the life of this
one man— Franz Boas. For anthropology, as we know it today, is
largely Boas.

When Benjamin Franklin flew his kite aloft on the banks of the
Schuylkill River in 1752, he brought down a spark of electricity out
of the clouds. This one act demolished the age-old thesis of the
diabolical agency in storms. Just so, a whole world of foolish super-
stition fell when Magellan in 1519 made his famous voyage around
I f, the world. Unfortunately nothing quite so dramatic is possible in
destroying the false theories about man. The type of proof that
the science of anthropology must necessarily employ requires a fa!r
greater comprehension. While it is true that no normal person has
less than twice the cranial capacity of the orangutan or chimpanzee^
it is amazing how in studying himself modern man has frequently
transformed the science of anthropology into “barbarology.” ^^^^^^ ^
Franz Boas is a composite theorist— a theorist who has absorbed
into his mind the labors and achievements of countless thinkers
before him. Because his doctrines do not belch and bombard terror
into the public mind, the average man knows little or nothing
about Boas. Singularly unambitious for fame, he has made himself
conspicuous in the history of the theory of man.

Gobineau died in 1882, just a few months after young Boas had
received his doctorate from the Univeristy of Kiel. He was twenty-
three years old then and he had already attended Heidelberg and
Bonn. During these early academic years his work had not touched
the field of anthropology. Geography, geology, and physics were
his chief interests. It was in pursuit of greater geographical knowl-
edge that Boas stumbled upon anthropology. What Darwin owed
to the voyage of the Beagle, and Robert Mayer to that memorable
trip on the /aw, the career of Boas owes to an expedition under-

BOAS

365

taken in 1883-1884 to the area directly north of Hudson Bay-to
Cumberland Sound and Davis Strait. Here the youthful scientist
spent almost two full years among the Central Eskimo. Upon his
return to Germany he brought back not only new material on the
geography of that remote region but-and this is more important-
abundant information on the Eskimo and his culture. With this
unique Eskimo data in his hands Boas now determined to devote his
life to anthropology.

In a field so heavily blanketed with dogma— especially the dogmas
of Gobineau— it is remarkable that Boas should have entered upon
his career of anthropology with the invaluable habit of questioning
everything. Perhaps it was only natural that the man who had
studied geography, physics, mathematics and geology should have
adopted from the earliest days of his first anthropological investi-
gation the outlook of the natural scientist. Progress means that
we become freer of the tyranny of the past. Had not Boas adopted
the strict discipline of the natural sciences, he could not have broken
with this tyranny, nor could he have made “possibly the greatest
single contribution of any scholar of the last three generations”
to the understanding of man. The essence of immortality is to
make an exception of oneself.

He had been teaching geography at the University of Berlin,
and at the same time acting as assistant in the Royal Ethnological
Museum, when the opportunity came to undertake a new expedi-
tion, this time under the auspices of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, to study the Indians of the British Colum-
bia area. In 1886 we find Boas seven thousand miles from Berlin
initiating a new and revolutionary approach to the study of man.

He knew that the great need of anthropology was first and fore-
most reliable data. That is why the bibliography of his work re-
veals scores of concrete monographic investigations appearing in
numerous learned journals. The output of Boas, covering a period
of almost sixty consecutive years, is staggering in its immensity
and diversity. He is a seeker after data. Data belong to a stage in
the investigation which comes before the attainment of knowledge.

In 1888 Boas secured his first academic connection in the United
States at Clark University. Eight years, later he began lecturing
at Columbia, the university with which he has identified himself

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

366

from that time. Today Franz Boas is in his eightieth year. Distin-
guished honors have been conferred upon him, including the presi-
dency of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
But greater than these honors is the fact that almost every Ameri-
can anthropologist has been his student. Out of his capacity for
unusual penetration he has built a permanent highway leading to
a scientific knowledge of man.

Unlike Gobineau the work of Boas is devoid of subjective phan-
tasy. There are no easily won conclusions, no preconceived ideas,
no political theories to uphold, no prejudices to bolster, no animus
to defend. Gobineau’s books are a phantom stage of anthropology
crowded with illusory scenery. Upon this stage the Aryan theory
is the chief actor. Gobineau, however, never allowed his favorite
actor to run the gauntlet of facts. On the other hand, consider the
work of Boas: his repeated trips to study primitive peoples, his
measurements of all types and classes of human beings from in-
habitants of the crowded city of New York to the Indians of British
Columbia, his careful collections of ethnographical specimens, his
vast linguistic studies— only then can it be appreciated how he has
tunneled through the complex data on man until fact meets fact
in significant penetration. With Boas no unproved assumptions are
permissible. Upon the sunken piers of obsolete theories his work
rears its giant superstructure.

The clash between the ideas of Gobineau and Boas possesses
contemporary world significance— not because the concept of a supe-
rior race was new or original with Gobineau, but because few
examples serve better to illustrate its creedal vainglory than his
Aryan theory.

Ideas of superiority, delusions of grandeur and megalomania
probably emerged with the first consciousness of man that his racial
group was different from others. Wherever we meet the superiority
theories, in antiquity or modern times, they are all extraordinarily
alike. They constitute the faith of the unenlightened, maintained,
of course, by the stupidity of the many and the cunning of the few.

Aristotle, in the fifth century b.c., declared that the peoples of
northern Europe— that is, the Nordic barbarians— were spirited but

BOAS

367

I lacked intelligence. The Asiatics, he further argued, were intelli-
j gent but lacked bravery and spirit. Therefore, he concluded, the
Greeks, because they were geographically intermediate, were fitted
by nature to rule the world. He pictured the Greeks living on a
garlanded island in the waste sea of barbaroi. Aristotle carried this
same doctrine into the domain of class distinctions, claiming that
superiority and inferiority exist there as between man and woman,
master and slave, intellectual and laborer. Not only are these broad
' distinctions rooted in social realities, he said, but they are justified

, by nature— that is, they are inherent biologically. The Greeks be-

lieved they had a natural right to rule over barbarians, as Euripides
wrote in Iphigenia:

It is meet

That Greek should over Barbarians bear sway.

Not that Barbarians lord it over Greece;

Nature hath formed them slaves, the Grecians free.

■;i-: ■

Later, when the Romans became powerful conquerors, they also
i felt the need of explaining their superiority. Vitruvius, in the sec-

j ond century b.c., merely shifted the Aristotelian argument some-

what to the west, and “proved” that the Romans had the highest
degree of intelligence and spirit. Like the ancient Greeks who con-
sidered themselves the “best” people and all others barbaroi, so the
ancient Hebrews declared that they were the “chosen” of Yahweh
in contradistinction to the Gentiles. This teaching of the synagogue
was matched by the doctrine of the Christian church that human-
ity is divided into two groups; Christian and heathen. Christians
enjoy the approval of God as the special objects of his solicitude,
whereas all heathen peoples are under the dominion of Satan and
his diabolical devices.

Certain American Indian tribes felt sure that they were superior
to all other groups of mankind. A folk tale speaks of the Creator
baking three loaves of bread. The first loaf he took from the oven
' was underdone, pasty and light. This became the white people.
Another loaf was burned, also not fit for use, and this black crisp
became the Negro people. But the third loaf was baked to perfec-
tion, brown and beautifully done, and this, of course, became the
Indians.

$68 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

The tribes o£ Africa also consider themselves the bravest and
best of all peoples. One tribe tells the story that in the beginning
all peoples were dark. One day the Creator had a fearful task which
he wanted his people to perform, and those who turned white with
fright retained that color to become white people.

The Greeks felt superior. So did the Egyptians, the Romans, the
Hebrews. All peoples have their own stories to validate this feeling
—each people declaring that only they are the salt of the earth. In
the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin (1530-1596) of France showed
astronomically that the planets exerted themselves in most favor-
able combination over France, and therefore, indisputably, the
French were destined to be the masters of the world. A logical
corollary to the sentiment of superiority is that all other groups—
or “races”— are naturally inferior.

Besides this, the economic factor has always crept in to compli-
cate matters. Group resentment, reinforced by economics, can be
seen in the history of American immigration. Antipathy was first
directed against the Irish, and then the German immigrant became
the target. Later it was the Jew and the Italian. It is obvious that
what is strange and foreign can easily arouse hostility, for the for-
eigner is always suspect. He wears peculiar clothes, follows absurd
customs, speaks in an incomprehensible language, and is regarded
as a potential threat to the normal life of decent people. This phe-
nomenon is not peculiar to our own civilization. The Benaue tribe
of the Philippines is feared and despised by the neighboring Kiangan
people as aliens who mispronounce words, wear G-strings of a dif-
ferent pattern, trim their hair another way, and make baskets of
deerskin instead of rattanl

Together with economic necessity, the forces of group solidarity
and group loyalty are often as strong as man’s attachment to life
itself. These basic feelings have been frequently played upon and
subtly manipulated to support various theories of racial and na-
tional superiority which have had repercussions through the pages
of history. Race pride often becomes a sort of “pooled self-esteem,”
fiercely upholding any pseudoscientific theory which guarantees its
own excellence. Apparently it makes no difference that these assump-
tions and claims are perpetrated in the face of objective facts to
the contrary. An appreciation of the absurdities of these views led

BOAS

to the definition of a nation as “a society united by a common
error as to its origin and a common aversion to its neighbors.” Or,
as Daniel Defoe poetically stated it in the eighteenth century:

Proudly they learn all mankind to contemn;

And all their race are true-born Englishmen.

Gobineau’s entire concept of superiority received a withering
refutation from Boas in The Mind of Primitive Man (igix), a book
which is interwoven by chains of reasoning as strong as they are
gripping. Throughout it is pervaded with the scientific spirit, carry-
ing both an intellectual and moral response to any disclosure of
truth. Within less than three hundred pages Boas accomplishes the
gigantic task of putting in order the enormous muddle of provable
data, binding them together and interconnecting all parts into a
unitary structure. You cannot read him without an innate respect
for the scientist who unmistakably displays exceptional penetration,
integrity and courage.

The Mind of Primitive Man is made up of ten short chapters,
the first being entitled “Racial Prejudices.” After a brief introduc-
tory paragraph Boas begins at once to pulverize the naive assump-
tion of the superiority of European nations and their descendants,

(a) that the white race represents the highest type of perfection,

(b) that a race is lower the more fundamentally it differs from the

white. “Differences between the white race and other races must
not be interpreted to mean superiority of the former, inferiority
of the latter, unless this relation can be proved by anatomical or
physiological considerations.” To state that the Mongols and
Negroes are anatomically closer to the ape-form is to assume an
untested and unsupported view. The assumption by itself is an
insufiicient guarantee of truth. Boas patiently examined what pur-
ports to be the evidence and found that there is nothing to war-
rant the glibly announced biological inferiority of so-called back-
ward peoples. :

The attempt to grade races in a progressive series from the ani-
mal upwards cannot be done because “the specifically human char-
acteristics are most highly developed, some in one race, some in

architects of ideas

another.” Take for example just two illustrations: the red external
lips of the Negro and the hairy body of the white man. Even &e
highest animals are devoid of the red lips, which shows that m this
one characteristic the Negro is more advanced than the White.
Moreover, the Negro, the Mongol and the American Indian have
very slight hairiness of the body and the face compared with the
more animalistic hair feature of the white man. When men are
examined feature by feature it cannot be said that the whites are

biologically superior. , . i • j ..t, *

But what of mental superiority? Gobineau claimed that the

white race tops the list. After a careful examination of this claim.
Boas rejected it as a pure assumption. The foundations of Gobi-
neau’s theory proved sandy when the spade went deep enough. Boas
does not claim the mental equality of the races. He merely examined
the assumptions of the Gobineau school and declared that, as yet,
there is no proof to establish their doctrine. Without^ belittling the
evidence that exists in favor of racial differences, it is nevertheless
certain that, at present, there is no evidence whatsoever to wyant
one race’s claiming inherent mental superiority over another. Not-
withstanding the numerous attempts that have been made to find
structural differences between the brains of different races of man
that could be directly interpreted in psychological terms, no con-
clusive results of any kind have been attained.” Anatomists cannot
with certainty differentiate between the brain of a German and

a Negro, , . , , , . ,

It is true that the white race has developed a highly mechanical

civilization. In certain respects the white man’s civilization stands
immeasurably above all others. Hence the flattering inference that
there is only one great civilization. In essence Gobineau’s doctrine
tvas this: Men are many, civilization is one, meaning that the meiital
qualities and capacities of the races are not only different but im-
mutable, and that one race alone— the white race— has produced
a “true” civilization. Gobineau stressed the thought that the human
race is’ not a unit but a congeries of ethnic groups intellectually
unequal. On the other hand. Boas, out of his vast contacts with
peoples and cultures, has shown that just the very opposite is true:
Man is one, civilimtions are many^

, , When civilizations are examined scientifically and dispassionately,

BOAS

371

no claim can be made that the culture of the white race is point
by point superior to all others. With only fragmentary knowledge
of cultures and civilizations, Gobineau attempted to present a view
which would have universal validity. As a matter of historical rec-
ord it is only since the fifteenth century that “white superiority”
has been at all manifest. Before that, Europe was constantly on
the defensive against the hordes of Asia. It is generally agreed that
until the seventeenth century Europe produced no state which was
as well organized as China and no army which was as well drilled
as the followers of the Mongol khans. “We must bear in mind,”
argued Boas, “that none of these civilizations was the product of
the genius of a single people. Ideas and inventions were carried
from one to the other; and, although intercommunication was slow,
each people which participated in the ancient development con-
tributed its share to the general progress. Proofs without number
have been forthcoming which show that ideas have been dissemi-
nated as long as people have come into contact with one another,
and that neither race nor language nor distance limits their dif-
fusion. As all have worked together in the development of the
ancient civilizations, we must bow to the genius of all, whatever
group of mankind they may represent— Hamitic, Semitic, Aryan,
or Mongol.”

' - 11

The main scientific idea that emerges from Boas is the unity of
mankind. Races are more similar than dissimilar. The strong line
of demarcation that Gobineau made between the white, the yellow,
and the black does not exist. Nor is there any such permanence or
immutability of racial type as Gobineau believed. Even in the
absence of racial intermixture, racial types are by no means per-
manent. What Galileo said of the earth e pur se muove, Boas has
said of race. Not immobility but mobility is the law. Race is every-
where dynamic. The various types of men differ from each other
in degree and not in kind. All men belong to one species and they
are connected with each other by innumerable gradations.

Nor is there any such thing as a “pure” race. The concept ap-
pealed to Gobineau’s fancy, but it is without foundation. Of all
people the whites are the most mixed— presenting striking diversity
of bodily traits. As a consequence of wars, migrations, raids, trade.

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

372

colonization and other factors, race minglings have been going on
for many thousands of years. Out of these minglings of races new
races have arisen. This makes the problem of classifications diffi-
cult, for there has been so much mingling that clear-cut definitions
are well-nigh impossible. As a matter of fact, no anthropologist
knoxvs where Caucasian leaves off and where Mongolian begins.
Inasmuch as all races are hopelessly mixed, any theory of race supe-
riority will have to find a more convincing argument than the
fiction of “purity.”

To Boas, the world is a vast melting pot, more so today than
ever before in the history of man. Races are now mingling on a
gigantic scale, and in this process older races are doomed to be
absorbed in the wider complex now forming. Is this good or bad
for mankind as a whole? No simple reply can be given. Boas merely
says that there are excellences present among all people no matter
how complexly blended. Fusions have taken place in the past and
they are taking place today— despite decrees of kings, dictators,
parliaments or race-dogmatists. And even if it were possible to
isolate or segregate races (and of course it is not), still the task
would be futile because all peoples are already inextricably blended;
the population of every nation rests upon a mixed racial basis, Im
termixtures of diverse stocks, which have been going on for count-
less centuries, offer no ground whatsoever for the fears of racial
degeneracy which haunted Gobineau and his followers. Race mix-
ture has occurred through the ages and the whole future trend of
mankind points to an amalgamation of peoples on a scale never
before accomplished. In the long course of man’s existence on earth
race mixtures have proceeded at times vigorously and at times
slowly. Race has never been static— never the biological fixture that
Gobineau believed. “The history of Europe proves,” declares Boas,
“that there has been no racial purity anywhere for exceedingly
long periods, neither has the continued intermixture of European
types shown any degrading effect upon any of the European nation-
alities.”

In the final chapter of The Mind of Primitive Man entitled
“Race Problems in the United States,” Franz Boas brings to bear
upon the melting pot of the American Union the full force of
scientific anthropology. Because the large Negro population forms

BOAS

373

about one-eighth of the whole nation. Boas devotes considerable
attention to the colored man. Rejecting the doctrine of inferiority.
Boas writes: “The traits of the American Negro are adequately
explained on the basis of his history and social status. The tearing-
away from the African soil and the consequent complete loss of
the old standards of life, which were replaced by the dependency
of slavery and by all it entailed, followed by a period of disorgani-
zation and by a severe economic struggle against heavy odds, are
sufficient to explain the inferiority of the status of the race, with-
out falling back upon the theory of hereditary inferiority. In short,
there is every reason to believe that the Negro, when given facility
and opportunity, is perfectly able to fulfill the duties of citizenship
as well as his white neighbor.”

Much happens in nature for which science has yet no complete
analysis. The study of heredity, environment, diet, and other com-
plex subjects are in their raw infancy. “Too little is known” is a
common phrase which runs through the cautious writings of Boas.
Much in science is not final, only an interim report. Science, there-
fore, recognizes the unknown but not the unknowable. When we
know we don’t know that in itself is helpful, for then men become
honest with themselves and the field may be cleared of the rubbish
of mysticism and confusion. “Is it not then our plain duty,” Boas
asks, “to inform ourselves that, so far as that can be done, delib-
erate consideration of observation may take the place of heated
discussion of beliefs in matters that concern not only ourselves, buf
also the welfare of millions of Negroes?” His plea did not go un-
heeded. Today the veteran anthropologist of Columbia can boast
that his disciples are studying all races and all cultures scientifically,
dispassionately, without praise or blame.

Race is one of the great idols of our time— a veritable Moloch
to whom men sacrifice themselves and their children. But an idol
is useless unless it can prove itself a reality. “Ye rub them with oil
and wax and the flies stick to them” (Koran). To purge the world
of this idolatry has been the lifelong task of Franz Boas. In the Tem-
ple of Science where he works there are no incantations. No potent
arcana lie hidden. There are no sacred books and no scrolls are
sealed. Its walls have no mystic symbols and no priest represents
the deity.

374

architects of ideas

The concluding paragraph o£ The Mind of PrimUix^ Man ka
good example of the reasonableness and fairness^of the scientific
point of view. “I hope the discussions contained in these pages
have shown that the data of anthropology teach us a greater toler-
ance of forms of civilization different from our own, and that we
should learn to look upon foreign races with greater sympat y,
and with the conviction that, as all races have contributed in the
past to cultural progress in one way or another, so they will be
capable of advancing the interests of mankind, if we are only wi -

ine to give them a fair opportunity. .. .

If science is capable of carrying with its sterner disciplines a
spiritual promise to humanity, then that promise may very well
be found in a reasonableness of outlook enabling man to transcen
his bestiality as life transcends dust. It was a murderer who asked
indignantly, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” But it was a philosopher
who said, “I am a man and nothing that is human is alien to me.

THEORY OF RELATIVITY

OF the few cities that have been intimately connected with the
lives of the great theorists Munich ranks with London and Paris.
Count Rumford lived there for more than a decade, and Max
Joseph von Pettenkofer after him spent his entire life in the Ba-
varian capital, where he laid the foundations of modern hygiene.
Among the many notable statues that adorn its streets and parks
—statues of Goethe the poet, Wagner the musician, Liebig the
chemist— there is one of Rumford and one of Pettenkofer. But
none of Einstein.

Yet Einstein spent his youth in Munich. He was born in Ulm,
Wiirttemberg, on the Danube, on May 14, 1879. From infancy
there was an atmosphere of science about him; for his father, though
a merchant, possessed a particular inclination for technical matters.
In 1880, a few months after Albert’s birth, Herr Einstein became
part owner of an electro-technical plant in Munich and moved there
with his wife Pauline and their infant son.

As a youth in Munich Einstein exhibited no particular precocity:
he was dreamy, sensitive, shy, even mentally awkward, certainly un-
distinguished. He displayed no outward sign of the genius that was
to follow. Perhaps the type of instruction given to him in the
Bavarian elementary school— mechanically dull and at times brutal
—did much to stifle his spirit. It left him uninspired, crushed, and
lonely. Particularly because he was Jewish it was difficult for him
to identify himself with teachers and pupils who were permanently
hostile. On one occasion an instructor brought a large nail to class
and told his pupils that it was the iron which the Jews had used
to nail Jesus to the cross. The incident, to be sure, did not help
the cause of religion; nor did it improw young Einstein’s status.

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

376

Am ong all the unpleasant experiences that wounded him, one
genuinely happy and helpful contact emerges from these Munich
days. At the Luitpold Gymnasium there was an instructor who had
a remarkable talent for inspiring his pupils. From this man, whose
name was Reuss, young Einstein learned the beauties of the classical
world. Once having caught the spirit of Shakespeare, Goethe, and
Schiller, his inner hunger found nourishment. Poetry and literature
now became a permanent element of the creative world he was seek-
ing to build. Vaguely he discerned in himself the tendency to gen-
eralize and to realize his world as an aesthetic, ordered, comprehen-
sive unity. His love for music, his religious devotion to the won-
ders of nature, heightened the emotional effect of his endeavors.

Then there was his passion for mathematics, particularly geom-
etry whose theorems and constructions gave him almost mystical
delight. “It brought him,” says his biographer Anton Reiser, “the
classical experience of perfect harmony, and his preoccupation with
mathematics became the most beautiful adventure of his youth.”
Until Albert was fifteen years old Munich claimed him, first in
the elementary school and afterwards in the Luitpold Gymnasium.
Perhaps he would have continued on, graduating from the high
school and the local university, had his family not moved to Italy.
By transferring his business from Munich to Milan, Herr Einstein,
never too successful with his electro-technical enterprise, had hoped
to give his small family something more than the illusion of a
living.

Settled in Milan, without any attachment to scholastic studies,
Albert felt free to roam for a while, to take long hikes and bask
in the warm Italian sun, to indulge his gypsy nature, to study art,
to play his violin, to philosophize, to visit interesting places, to read
with pleasure, to wander through libraries and galleries, to think
of ships and long to sail. This period marks the beginning of his
unwearying exploration into the varied domains of knowledge, and
the deepening of his love for music and boats. Did not Isaac New-
ton picture himself standing on the shore of the vast ocean of
knowledge holding a mere pebble in his hand, symbolic of man’s
eternal quest? Not on the shore but on some gallant ship, rigged

He was only seventeen when he entered the Zurich Polytechnic
Academy. He was happy, now that he was in the right school, headed
in the right direction. Here he met Mileva Marie, a talented
Serbian girl, a fellow student who was to become the first Mrs.
Einstein. Here too he met, and was influenced by, the great mathe*
matician Hermann Minkowski, then a professor, who ten years later
made an extremely important contribution to Einstein’s investiga-
tions. His chief interest at this time, however, was not mathematics
but physics and he was thinking largely in terms of the classical
manner of the nineteenth century scientists, while he roamed in asso-

• Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Sonnet 37, The Choice.

And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,—

Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea.*

The family fortunes, always thin but now at low ebb, made it
necessary for him to decide at once on a career. He chose to under-
take a pilgrimage to Switzerland in an effort to enter the Polytechnic
Academy at Zurich. At first he was rejected, but in the following
year the doors of the institution opened to this determined boy
who had already mapped out for himself his own philosophy of
life. Like Pasteur he wanted to be a teacher; that was his imme-
diate objective. To devote himself ultimately to the discovery of
theoretical truths was his one surpassing ambition. In pursuit of
these far-off expectations he crossed the national boundaries of
Europe— from Germany-to Switzerland-to Italy— and back again
to Switzerland. And then, years later, from Germany to America.
Down the vista of the years these crossings have come to have a
strange symbolic meaning; on the one hand they are eloquent with
the beauty of the international spirit of Einstein, singularly at home
wherever men strive to know; and on the other hand they speak of
the tragedy of exile. Somehow the biography of this man seems to
embody the experiences and vicissitudes shared by all men of sci-
ence across time and space.

EINSTEIN 3^7

out with sails of expectation, the youthful Einstein visualized his
desire to search for new horizons:

3/78 ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

Giation with all the great physicists of the past. Yet his eyes, turning
away from the dimensional concepts of the commonplace, were
beginning to see the wonders of another world. Unthought-of
things now began to thread themselves together in new and won-
derful combinations full of surprising affinities and unexpected rela-
tions of opposites. In him the boldness of science— its surprises, its
paradoxes-took hold together with an eagerness to push forward
the frontiers of knowledge. Here were the age-old problems of
physical phenomena. Could they be adequately solved by the ac-
cepted doctrines of orthodox science? He entertained certain doubts
about that.

By this time his father’s business in Italy had declined so greatly
that when Einstein had reached his twenty-second year, he was forced
to take employment in the International Patent Office at Bern.
Being an examiner of patents was for him an admittedly bread
and cheese affair, not altogether dull but certainly too much of
a routine. Still, it did not deter him from pursuing his graduate
studies at the University of Zurich, nor did it prevent him from
pioneering a new world of thought and laying those mighty foun-
dations of his career as a scientific colossus who was to bestride the
wide universe of natural phenomena.

Early in 1903 he married Mileva Marie. The small salary of the
Patent Office enabled him to establish a home, a tiny top-floor
apartment where he could receive his guests and discuss the struc-
tural aspects of the new theory that was slowly taking shape in his
mind. These were days of great imagination, the early creative years
of relativity when ideas came to him in startling profusion— thoughts
of almost inhuman immensity in sheer vastness of reach and span.
He divided his time between the Patent Office and his apartment,
working feverishly on those sparks of illuminative insight that had
set his mind aglow with the possibility of an epochal discovery. By
1904 his thoughts had clarified; he was now ready to present to
the world the first formulation of the special theory of relativity.
A treatise appeared entitled Toa;«rci the Electrodynamics of Moving
Bodies, published in 1905. It was soon followed by several shorter
papers: The Law of Brownian Movement; On the Quantum Nature
of Rays; Identity of Mass and Energy., A storm of scientific ere-

EINSTEIN

ativity had been unleashed within him. The genius of Einstein had

emerged.

Recognition came fast. From Berlin the great physicist Max
Planck, father of the quantum theory, wrote him a letter of heard-

est congratulations. Then there was Professor Kleiner of Zurich,
under whom Einstein had studied, who now used his influence to
secure for his younger colleague a teaching post at the University
of Bern. Gone now was the drudgery at the Patent Office. That
had not been without its compensations, but he was headed in
another diiection: his new duties at the university and the acclaim
of the world which culminated in an invitation to lecture on rela-
tivity and the constitution of light before the Congress of Scien-
tists which was to meet in 1908 in Salzburg. From Bern Einstein
was called in 1909 to a professorship at the University of Zurich.

What were the steps that led Einstein to relativity? He began
his thinking in terms of orthodox science, with the accepted ideas,
notions, concepts and theories of the nineteenth century physicists.
These stalwart thinkers were like the ancients with their pillars of
Hercules, inscribing on their columns of faith Ne Plus Ultra-
Nothing More Beyond. The inscription was a good defense mech-
anism, a safety device of no mean significance to the thinkers of
the Victorian Age. For beyond those pillars stretched out a vast
sea, terrifying in its unimaginable depth. While Einstein was still
a student at the Polyteclinic Academy he soon came to doubt the
validity of Ne Plus Ultra. To extend the range of his thought to
include that sea at present inaccessible, became his surpassing ambi-
tion. Was there not something intuitive in Columbus’ audacious
move to venture beyond the gates of Hercul«? It is not just simply
imagination but prepared imagination that is competent to take the
creative leap into the unknown. Preparation is light; imagination is
xnsion— not of course the vision of immediate things but of the un-
seen. From boyhood, Einstein had been attracted to the ideas of
the whole, the universal— always enthralled by the synthesis of the
parts. No mind on earth has ever been so congenial to the vastness
of the cosmos ranging from the magnitude of the sidereal universe
to the inverse immensity of the atom. The possibility of his mind’s

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

,§8o

seizing formative power, that is, a unifying interconnection, became
more and more real.

But the orthodox traditions of science, stemming from Sir Francis
Bacon, left little room for hypothesis. Bacon himself regarded them
with grave suspicion, for he had an aversion to “phantoms” of any
sort. In his opinion hypothesis had no lawful place in scientific
procedure, and he went so far as to urge that it be banished as
a disturbing element. Hypothesis came to mean the illusory, the
fanciful, the hallucinatory which could build an imposing but un-
real system of thought. Consequently, Bacon urged a knowledge of
general laws extracted from nature through direct observation.
Because an hypothesis has often exercised a distorting influence
(since the idea involves anticipation of the fact) he washed his
hands of them ail.

Man, however, is an incorrigible universe builder. From Thales
to Einstein— a space of twenty-five hundred years— he has thrown
the full weight of his genius into the scales of speculative theoriz-
ing. Plato spoke of man as the “microcosm,” as if in him the multi-
tudinousness of the world found epitome. The overwhelming figure
of Einstein supports this view: in him men sense that humanity has
reached a fullness of energy in a gigantic effort to know the world.
Such is the wonder of mind— man’s mind— unique in the animal
kingdom. Six monkeys set to strum on a typewriter for untold mil-
lions of years could not produce one sentence of Einstein’s books.

“It seems as if the subject to which I am about to invite your
attention could be treated only in poetry,” Taine exclaims elo-
quently in introducing his lecture on The Ideal in Art. To appre-
ciate Einstein, to know why he and no one else became the author
of the theory of relativity, is to understand the role of intuition and
inspiration in science. “When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my
intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact, I would have
been astonished had it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more
important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas
imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress. It
is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.” Einstein’s
astounding conceptions originated in a series of daring hypotheses
whose unifying features at first resembled the flight of poetic imag-

matwn However, deliverances of intuition cannot be tajten at their

face value, fhey need to be examined, submitted to theTrocS^^^^^^^

minute analysis and definition. Thus the work of Einstein bemns as

philosophy and ends as art; it arises in intuitive hypotheses and
flows into achievement. i^ypuLneses ana

The writmgs of Henri Poincare (1854-191.) did much to encour-
age young Einstein in his novel way of thinking. Poincare-steeped
m mathematics, astronomy and physics-was one of the most criti-
cal, aaring and philosophical thinkers of the pre-Einstein era. His
mind ranged over the great speculative problems of science and the
results were given to the world in a series of brilliant essays which

entitled The Foundations of
Science. Poincares aim was to give careful scrutiny to these foun-
dations, particularly where they are mathematical in character. One
glance at those essays illustrates how Poincar^ challenged the foun-
dations which orthodox scientists viewed as completely settled
beyorid controversy. It was evident to this French savant that ai

le^^dpfi ^ theoretical orthodoxy grows less possible,

less definable, less conceivable.

Consider space It is po^iWe to have two kinds of geometries
that will atack this problem, namely, a Euclidean geometry and
a non-Euclidean geometry. The geometry of figures traced on a flat
surface will be Euclidean. But suppose the sur&ce, instead of being
flat IS yhencal like the surface of the ocean viewed on a lar 4
scale; the geometp. of figures traced on it will exhibit the non-
Euclidean properties of a surface of positive curvature. Which then
IS the true geometry? Poincar6 answered this question to Einstein’s
inquiring satisfaction: “One geometry cannot be more true than
another; it can only be more convenient/*

In several important respects the geometry of a spherical surface
differs from that of a plane. On the surface of a sphere the short-
est distance between any two points, as every navigator knows, is
an arc of a great circle. Geometry therefore, argued Poincar^ is a
highly relative discipline. A sphere, for example, is convex in all
directions, but there are other surfaces such as a stem of a wine-
glass, a saddle, or a mountain pass which are convex in one direc-
tion and concave in another and for these types of surfaces stiU

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

382

other types of geometries are necessary. Now, a plane surface is
said to have no curvature. The geometry of Euclid is that of figures
on a plane surface; hence Euclidean geometry is plane geometry.
Euclid assumed space to be subjected to his plane treatment-there-
fore, he assumed space to be Euclidean. (All non-Euclidean sur-
faces owe their peculiar properties to the fact that they are curved in
special ways.)

That Newton thought in terms of Euclidean geometry is com-
mon knowledge. Yet he could not have done otherwise, for the
developments of non-Euclidean geometry were not even dreamed
of. Still, Euclidean geometry was adequate for his purposes. But
for relativity Einstein had to employ the non-Euclidean systems.
So completely did Einstein accept Poincare’s point of view (namely,
that in many respects classical physics suffers from internal con-
tradictions) that shortly before Poincare died he issued to the world
the following tribute to the struggling young scientist. “Einstein,”
wrote Poincare, “is one of the most original minds that I have
ever met. In spite of his youth he already occupies a very honor-
able position among the foremost savants of his time. What we
marvel at in him, above all, is the ease with which he adjusts him-
self to new conceptions and draws all possible deductions from
them. He does not cling to classical principles, but sees all con-
ceivable possibilities when he is confronted with a physical prob-
lem. In his mind this becomes transformed into an anticipation of
new phenomena that may some day be verified in actual experience.
The future will give more and more proofs of the merits of Albert
Einstein, and the university that succeeds in attracting him may be
certain that it will derive honor from its connection with the young
master,”

Einstein had already come to grips with the interrelated prob-
lems of space, time, and matter. At first sight these three aspects of
the universe appear distinct and incapable of intermixture. But
Einstein soon arrived at the view that they are not forms of sepa-
ration, independent and isolated from each other as Newton be-
lieved; on the contrary, they are interlocked— that is, relative to
each other. There is no such thing, for example, as a timeless object
or a period of time not inarked off by objects in space. Newton,

EINSTEIN

383

however, regarded space and time as real entities, things of an
. absolute * physical character which, exist exterior to our mental
perception of them-in other words, free from conditions imposed
from without. The Newtonian doctrine may be stated in the fol-
lowing two propositions in Newton’s own language: (A) Absolute,
true, mathematical time flows on by virtue of its own nature, uni-
formly, and unrelated to any outward circumstance; (B) Absolute
^ space always remains the same by virtue of its own nature, un-
related to outxvard circumstances, and immovable.

When Einstein was a beginning student he believed in these
Newtonian conceptions. As he progressed skepticism grew apace.
He could not read Poincare without seeing that Newtonian physics
was built upon a dogmatic foundation that took too much for
granted. This foundation gave rise to prejudices and habits of
thought which stood in the way of solving innumerable difficult
pioblems. In other words, the foundation of Newton — the doctrine
of absolute space and absolute time — occasioned unnecessary diffi-
culties.

Wherein lay the error? In Newton’s separation of time and space.
The separation of time and space is a misleading theory because
they profoundly interpenetrate. To isolate them is to mutilate one’s
thinking about them. For time and space are not separate things;
they are relative to each other, constituent elements in a deeper
synthesis. Thus time is as much the essence of things as space. Time
is not something extra and superadded to things in their behavior;
it is basic to their constitution. The world, therefore, does not pos-
sess three dimensions but four. Time is the fourth dimension.

Examine for a moment the following illustration. An accident,
let us say, occurred at Forty-second Street (this is one dimension).
To say that it happened at Forty-second and Broadway is to add a
second dimension. When it is further suted that the accident took
place in the subway— that gives a third dimension. And to declare
that it took place at two o’clock last Tuesday afternoon gives us
the fourth dimension. Thus the accident happened in “space-time”

* The word absolute comes from the Latin verb absolvo and means detached.
In the course of time it also acquired the connotation of unconditioned, un-

fettered^ independent.

584 ARCHITECTS or IDEAS

on a four-dimensional basis: length, breadth, depth, and time.* By
means of the space-time system, any event, anywhere, anytime, may
be indexed and filed away.

Besides his debt to Poincar^, much of the cyclopean architecture
of Einstein’s early thinking was directly due to the formative in-
fluence of another unorthodox scientist, Ernst Mach (1838-1916)
who had been professor of mathematics and physics at the Universi-
ties of Graz, Vienna, and Prague. Like Einstein, his early youth
and first teaching experience were spent in comparative poverty,
against which he struggled with rare patience and resolution.

Mach was among the early pioneers of relativity. It took great
courage to challenge Newton. Next to reforming a religion the most
difficult task is to reform a science. “We can see that the physicists
are on the surest road to becoming a church, and are already ap-
propriating all the customary means to this end’’— so wrote Mach
in rebellion against “The communion of the Faithful.” Mach
strongly differed with Newton’s concept of an absolute space and
an absolute time, which he characterized as medieval. In an attempt
to replace it he wrote a book called T/?e Science of Mechanics
(1883), in which he anticipated the theory of relativity by consid-
ering the mutual relationslxip of things, not in a small isolated sys-
tem, but in the vast and interconnected system of the cosmos. Mach
denounced all isolated systems, all isolated experiments. “When we
say that a body preserves unchanged its direction and velocity in
space, our assertion is nothing more or less than an abbreviated
reference to the entire universe.” This one sentence states the most
luminous thought of relativity: that every action has a direct con-
nection with the entire universe no matter whether its separate
particles be miles or millions of light years from us.

Einstein could not have been so profoundly influenced by
Poincar^ and Mach had he not had an unusual mathematical back-
ground. Graham Wallas in his Art of Thought speaks of four stages
in the act of discovery: first, there is preparation, then incubation,
then illumination, and lastly verification. Einstein’s mathematical

*Or, if we prefer— (1) north-south, (2) east-west, (3) up-down, and (4) time.
All direction, of course, is relative. Chicago is east of San Francisco but west of
New York. That which is “up” to one observer may be “down” to another. For
a person at the North Pole there is no north, west or east, only south.

EINSTEIN 385

knowledge was decidedly preparatory: it pointed to a new synthesis
through which the very terms and strategies of the older physics
were to be dissolved and their rigid granite frames replaced by rela-
tivistic frames of reference. It is the supreme task of the theorist
to compress all knowledge within his domain into an understand-
able point of view, perpetually remolding his ideas, as his experi-
ence widens and his insight becomes more penetrating.

ft \ ; 6

It is the mathematical side of relativity that is full of the bewil-
derment of new-found thought. Much of it is deliriously confusing,
for it is intellectual champagne with a terrific fizz and sparkle. A
prolonged bout with it leaves one a bit groggy. However, if you
drink it slowly, it is not too difficult to absorb and to understand it.
Once we see or comprehend the historical development of a theory
we are surprised out of our habitual stolidity and blindness.

From the early days of antiquity it was found that mathematical
formulae can express certain laws governing the world that we
observe. The Greeks were particularly cognizant of this fact. In
; the history of mathematics the postulates of Euclid represent a syn-
thesis of Greek geometric ideas and relationships. With these postu-
i lates as a basis, a comprehensive geometric theory was developed
whose chief feature dealt with the curves known as conic sections.

I Centuries later, Kepler found that the theory of conic sections was
I precisely what he needed to develop the laws of planetary motion.

■ The next great step in mathematics was the synthesis of algebra
and geometry into the analytic work of Descartes. Then, through
1 the efforts of Newton and Leibnitz, the science of mathematics
grew again in the discovery of calculus. This resulted in forging the
; most powerful mathematical investigation which had yet been
j. known and enabled Newton to substantiate his theory of ^avitation
i by deducing Kepler’s laws from it. During the two centuries follow-
i ing the death of Newton his successors continued to develop a com-
i prehensive and majestic theory of the motions of heavenly bodies
i upon the mathematical foundation which he helped to create.

• Now the great systemization of Greek geometry which was ef-
fected by Euclid (although his reduction of the system to its , essential
assumptions was not final) was such as to awaken the admiration of

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

386

great mathematicians in every succeeding century. But there is one
point in which the Euclidean reduction is notably imperfect— the
so-called parallel axiom. This says essentially that through a given
point only one line can be drawn parallel to a given straight line.
In 1733 appeared Girolamo Saccheri’s book on Euclid. The im-
portance of this book consists in the fact that, although it was writ-
ten to vindicate Euclid’s parallel axiom once for all, it contains the
first outline as it were of a non-Euclidean geometry. Slowly, and
very gradually, the foundations of a new system of mathematics
were being laid. As a result of the work of the Hungarian Johann
Bolyai (1802-1860) and the Russian Nikolas Lobatchevsky (1793-
1856), logically consistent geometries were produced in which the
famous parallel postulate of Euclid was replaced by an essentially
different one. This marks the real beginning of the non-Euclidean
geometries. It would not have been possible for Einstein to replace
Newton had he not been able to employ the ideas evolved in the
non-Euclidean geometries. By sheer mathematical skill, making full
use of the beautiful theoretical apparatus acquired from his prede-
cessors— including men like Gauss, Riemann, Ricci and Levi-Civita
—Einstein was able to point to a new comprehension. He widened
the scope of mathematics to embrace phenomena of a vastly dif-
ferent kind than Newton had under consideration. Consequently,
it was to be expected that his theory would take a form not very
simple in statement and beyond the capacity of the average man to
understand.

In summing up the influences that molded Einstein— Poincare,
Mach, the non-Euclidean mathematicians— there stands out, above
them all, the figure of Isaac Newton. He is the giant that dwarfs
everyone else.

When Einstein promulgated the theory of relativity, much of
the popular enthusiasm that accompanied it was associated with the
false impression that it constituted a complete overthrow of New-
ton. Actually, however, relativity is an expansion and refinement
■ of Newton’s views. “In one person,” declared Einstein in a recent
tribute to the Cambridge scientist, “he combined the experimenter,
the theorist, the mech^ic and, not the least, the artist in exposi-
tion. He stands befqre ui strong, certain, and alone; his joy in

EINSTEIN gS'J;

creation and his minute precision are evident in every word and
f in every figure.”

On another occasion, the two-hundredth anniversary o£ the death
o£ Newton, Einstein set forth the significance of his great prede-
cessor in relation to the growth of the theory of relativity.* It is
a profound appreciation of Newton such as we would naturally
look for in so great a student as Albert Einstein. Not only is Newton
the leading figure in the invention of certain mathematical tools,
such as infinitesimal calculus, but he was among the first to state
clearly the needed union between the experimental and mathemati-
cal methods. He took vague terms like force and mass and gave
them a precise meaning. “Newton’s basic principles were so sat-
isfying from a logical standpoint that the impulse to fresh departures
could only come from the pressure of the facts of experience. Be-
fore I enter into this I must emphasize that Newton himself was
better aware of the weak side of his thought-structure than the suc-
f ceeding generations of students. This fact has always excited my
I reverent admiration.”

I The “weak side” of Newton became the strong side of Einstein,
as will now be seen. “The immense ocean of truth,” once declared
Newton, “extends itself unexplored.”

: : v : ; 1 . . ■ ;

Just as the story of the atom stretches back centuries before Dal-
ton to the ancient Greek thinkers, so the central idea of Einstein’s
work long occupied the minds of philosophers. He mastered the
best in others to co-ordinate their creations. The merit of Einstein
i is, therefore, this: for the first time he gave scientific validity to the
conception of relativity by establishing its mathematical proofs. In
j a sense it grew out of the philosophic notion of the relativity of all
\ knowledge. He laid hold of the idea that everything is measured
I by, or considered relative to, something else; that our concepts of
absolute time, space, motion are groundless for the very simple
reason that man does not possess any immovable or unchangeable
! standardv By giving these thoughts a, coherent mathematical basis
I he was able to formulate a particular theory which co-ordina;tes and "

the. Aenual Report of the lastitatKat , ' ; : ' ’

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

388

satisfies the observed laws o£ nature and accounts for discrepancies
which long troubled the scientists.

So much in science changes; facts and laws which reign tri-
umphantly today are dethroned tomorrow. The truth of yesterday
is so expanded that it ceases to be the truth. Yesterday we believed
in the sufficiency of Euclidean geometry, today it is non-Euclidean.
What does not change is the method of science. How this method
works may be seen in the genesis of the special theory of relativity.

By the time Einstein began his serious thinking, progressive
physical research had established with great certainty two important
facts which appeared to be mutually contradictory: (a) the principle
of relativity and (b) the constancy of the velocity of light. To re-
solve this conflict became the leading problem of science, for if one
principle is right the other must be wrong. The problem was
worked over by many men, but in spite of this all physical experi-
ments and experience only led back to these two opposing principles.
Here was an impasse. It was then that Albert Einstein came to the
rescue, when he stated: “We cannot doubt the truth of both prin-
ciples in question, in as far as we can trust the evidence of our
senses at all; nor can any fault be found with the logical thought-
process that proves the antagonism between the two principles. But
in the considerations connected with that proof there are certain
suppositions concerning the absoluteness and independence of our
notions of time and space, which appear to us so self-evident, that
up to the present nobody has ever doubted their truth. A more
careful analysis of these suppositions, however, shows that they only
appear to be self-evident, and that they are not absolute conceptual
necessities. Furthermore, by suitable modification of these concepts,
the antagonism between the two aforementioned principles dis-
appears.”

This indeed was a rare gleam of insight in the wilderness of
thought. As our knowledge of nature can only be altered by the
acquisition of new knowledge, this new discovery proved a decisive
step, for it enabled Einstein to derive conclusions arising from the
simultaneous validity of two conflicting principles. The sum-total of
- these conclusions is called; the special theory of relativity.

The main achievement of the special theory is the recognition
■ the description pf afr gypnt, whitdb is adniittedly only perfect

EINSTEIN

389

if both the space and time co-ordinates are specified, will vary ac-
! cording to the relative motion of the observer. It is called the special

\ theory because it affirms the relativity of uniform motions only,

i and is therefore valid only for this special class of motions (Einstein

j did not at this time, for example, consider curvilinear motions). It

, is of course a matter of everyday experience that ail mechanical

i events take place in a system which is moving uniformly and recti-

I linearly. Seated in a perfectly smooth-running train a man could

not tell that it was running if the shades were down, any more than
I he could tell that the earth rotates if there were no heavenly bodies.

: Motion is apparent only when compared.

i| Suppose we are on a ship. We cannot assert that it is in motion
■j unless we look out of the portholes and watch the passing waves.
I In that way we perceive that there is a relative motion between the
i ship and the ocean. Or, to vary our example a little, let us say that
our ship lies at anchor and another passes it with uniform velocity.
I (Theoretically you would feel just as comfortable on a uniformly
moving train or ship as you do in a room in a house.) One does
' not notice the uniform motion. As a matter of fact, all phenomena
would take place in the interiors of both ships in exactly the same
way; and if we were in their interiors we would not be cognizant
of motion. However, when we stand on the deck of one ship and

• look at the other we know that they are moving with respect to
each other. Thus, the detection of uniform rectilinear motion is

I impossible without reference to the surroundings. Consequently,
the principle of relativity is valid for mechanical processes. With
the single exception of the velocity of light, absolute motions are
' impossible to measure or even to detect. The observed motions of
the universe are all of a relative nature. Any attempt to detect abso-
lute motion would be invariably frustrated by the very nature of
! the interrelationship of matter and space.

Imagine you are on a ship moving down the Hudson River. At
exactly halfway between the bow and the stern you roll two balls
I down the deck at the same time with the same strength. One ball
you roll forward, the other aft. It is obvious that the first ball will
arrive at the bow of the ship at about the same time that the second
ball arrives at the stern. So far as you are concerned, the balls

• traveled at the same speed- But to a man bn the shoye observing

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

390

your rolling, the speed of the balls would not be the same for him
as they were for you. The man on the shore would say that the ball
which rolled forward moved faster than the ball which rolled aft.
He would say that the speed of the first ball was its original speed
plus the speed of the ship and the speed of the other ball was the
original speed minus the speed of the ship. Both you and he would
be right. The difference depends on the body referred to for meas-
urement. In your case it was the ship, in his, the shore.

From this relativity of motion, or more exactly of uniform mo-
tion, there follows the relativity of distances between points in
space. Suppose you are on a train and decide to walk forward to
the dining car. You start at one moment and a few minutes later
you arrive at your table in the diner. What is the distance you
have moved? It depends on how you measure it. If you measure
it relatively to the train it will be a rather short distance, perhaps
three hundred and fifty feet. If you measure the distance traveled
with respect to the earth it would be an entirely different quan-
tity, which depends on the speed of the train. Now whether you
walked three hundred and fifty feet or, say, a mile depends on
your frame of reference. Relatively to the train you walked three
hundred and fifty feet; relative to the earth you covered a mile.

This remodeling of Newtonian conceptions led Einstein to other
discoveries of fundamental importance. For example, it uncovered
the surprising fact that the old conception of the simultaneity of
events at different points of space (the conception on which all time-
measurements are based) has only a relative significance. This means
that two events that are simultaneous for one observer will not, in
general, be simultaneous for another.

We ordinarily imagine all processes to take place in the world
according to a simple time. But time is relative— even so-called
“simultaneous” events. There is no general world time, but only
times for each observer. Different times can be mathematically re-
lated to each other only by taking into account the relative motion
of the observers. Each observer has his own time, and therefore
two events at different places which are simultaneous for one
observer are not so for another.

; , A simple illustration will lay bare the meaning of the relativity
of sunxiltaneity^ Einstein. iULnstratcs this fact by asking us. to imagine

EINSTEIN

391

j two points, A and B, very far apart on a railway track. An observer

j is on a stationary embankment at M, midway between A and B.

Let us imagine that lightning strikes the rails at the two points
; A and B. If the observer sees the two flashes at the same instant

j we say that the two flashes occur simultaneously. Suppose you are

I now on a high-speed train moving along the track and that when

you reach the point M (that is, exactly opposite the observer on the
embankment) you see the same lightning flashes. Would the two
j ’ lightning strokes at A and B, which are simultaneous with respect
; to the embankment, also be simultaneous with respect to you on
: the moving train? No. The reason is that the motion of the train
is carrying you toward one flash and away from another. There-
fore, argues Einstein, we are forced to the conclusion that events
which are simultaneous for one rigid body of reference (embank-
ment) are not simultaneous for another body of reference (the
f train). Consequently, all statements of time depend on the stand-
point of the observer describing them, and are thus different for
two observers who are in motion with respect to each other.

The idea that time flows equally for all bodies regardless of their
: motion is Newtonian but inaccurate. Go back to the ship illustra-

; tion. It will show how and why the notion of absolute simultaneity
is not true. Our belief that now is the same now for every atom
; in the universe turns out to be wholly erroneous. Thus, if the two
balls strike the two ends of the ship respectively at the same instant,
I we have assumed (erroneously, of course) that such an instant is

^ the same for the man on the ship as well as the man on the shore.

Indeed, we have assumed that such an instant would be the same
' for every man anywhere. But that cannot be true, for an observer
\ at rest in regard to the two events may observe them to be simul-
taneous whereas an observer in motion will observe the one sooner
than the other. There is no reason whatever for assuming that
events, separate in space, can be unified in time. The distance in
time, for example, between two events taking place in Jupiter and
Mars will appear different to an observer on the earth and one on
another planet. In other words, again, what seems simultaneous
in one frame of reference will not be simultaneous in another.

Similar reasoning applies in the case of the distance between two
. points on a rigid body. The length of a rod is defined as the dis-

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

592

tance between the two points which zxe occu-pied simultaneously
by the two ends. Since simultaneity is definitely relative, therefore
the distance between two points (since they depend on a simultane-
ous reading of two events) is also relative. Consequently, length
has meaning only in relation to a body of reference. It has not, as
Newton believed, the same volume and shape whatever its motion.
Relativity affirms that any change of motion entails a correspond-
ing change of length so that the “actual” length of a body in the
absolute Newtonian sense does not exist. The newer theory there- “
fore demonstrates that most of the traditional scientific laws con-
sist of pure conventions as to measurement, strictly analogous to
the “great law” that there are three feet to a yard.

Contrary to expectations, Einstein had no great love for his
professorship at the University of Zurich. The duties of the office
encroached upon his time. He was in the midst of elaborating his
theory and needed a certain solitude, free from the claims of the
lecture room. Nor could he become genuinely interested in fac-
ulty life, its conversations, clubs, and social life. He knew what
he wanted~a quiet, meditative life removed from time-consuming
duties and meaningless social activities. Could he achieve that?

After spending several years at Zurich and one year at the Ger-
man University of Prague, his dream was fulfilled. Einstein was
called to Berlin where Kaiser Wilhelm signed a special dispensa-
tion permitting him, though he was now a Swiss national, to be-
come professor at a newly created institute which bore the royal
name of the reigning emperor— The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Physics. At the same time he was elected a member of the Prussian
Academy of Sciences. Practically all his wishes were to be granted;
all extraneous duties were to be reduced to a minimum in order
to give him the necessary independence for research.

In the spring of 1914 Einstein began his new work in Berlin.
He knew now that his field was pure theory rather than experi-
ment. Was relativity a comprehensive world-view? Yes, he believed
it was. Otherwise he would not have labored at it with such tenacity
since tire publication of the restricted theory. And just as the special
{or restricted) theory had long been an alluring goal of science

EINSTEIN

393

j which he alone was able to achieve, so now the earlier ambitious
I attempt at synthesis was expanded into the general theory of relativ-
ity. With unyielding logic he pursued to their farthest points the
implications and prior conditions of facts which he knew with a
high degree of precision. He combined the accumulated knowledge
with the imaginative visioning of possibilities in such a way as to
predict the character of the still unexplored portions of nature.

As the special theory is only valid for uniform rectilinear mo-
j' tions, it became desirable to be able to affirm that every motion
! is relative. Having achieved success with one particular class of
motions, he set out to create a general theory of relativity that
would embrace the whole realm of physics. These efforts were
brought to a successful conclusion just one year after he had moved
to Berlin. It is this general theory (not the special theory) that led
i Einstein to a new treatment of gravitational phenomena, thereby
I taking physics very far beyond Newton.

; The general theory brought the domain of physics into good or-
der. Its chief quality is an internal logical coherence which only
! the language of mathematics can express. Matter, electricity, radia-
i tion, energy— all are included. It obliterated the barrier between
i matter and energy by furnishing a formula for their transforma-
i tion. The central result is Einstein’s law of gravitation which he
f achieved by an extraordinarily brilliant piece of mathematical
( analysis. The fusion of the forces of gravity with those of inertia
into one single whole is the fundamental idea of his gravitational
' system. Though entirely different from Newton’s in mathematical
form, Einstein’s law gives results almost identical with those of
\ Newton. Had it not been so the new theory could not have been
right, for Newton’s law of the inverse square is able to predict the
movements of the sun, moon, and planets with great precision, as
well as explain in detail the procession of the equinoxes, the tides,

' the figure of the earth and many other phenomena. For ordinary
purposes the two laws come to the same thing. However, it must
be borne in mind that Einstein’s theory is no more of an explana-
tion of gravity than Newton’s. But it is a more correct description.
While it gives results identical with those of Newton’s, it does a
certain job which the Newtonian apparatus could not do.

* The historian of science of the future, standing farther from the

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

394

events of today than we can do, will see much better the back-
yards of science littered with discarded theories, laws, principles,
hypotheses. Of all the theories of the cause of gravitation that have
been propounded since the time of Newton, Einstein’s marks the
first positive advance in two centuries. The Annual Report of the
Smithsonian Institution for 1876 lists more than twenty-five theories
which found their way into print after Newton wrote his Principia
(still rated the most massive addition to scientific thought ever
made by one man). Since 1876 one may safely add another dozen.
Some of these attempts at theory have been nothing more than
meaningless mysticism and others nothing more than a profound
investigation of an empty mare’s nest. Einstein’s alone has emerged,
has survived and grown and produced momentous results.

Most people think that the explanation of falling bodies, as due
to an attracting force exerted by the earth, was wholly original with
Newton. This is not true. Galileo was familiar with the idea; and
Aristotle, living more than fifteen hundred years before Newton,
knew about it. Even the law of the inverse square had suggested
itself to more than one mind before Newton. Wherein then lay
Newton’s especial contribution? His was the conception and the
mathematical demonstration of the universality of gravitation: that
the law of the inverse square was a sufficient explanation for (a)
the motion of the moon around the earth, (b) the motion of the
various planets around the sun, (c) the motions of every member
of the stellar universe. The success of relativity does not lessen the
grandeur of this accomplishment or minimize the significance of
the inscription which appears on Newton’s monument: “Let mor-
tals congratulate themselves that so great an ornament of the human
race has existed.”

Over a century elapsed before any serious divergence of observa-
tion from Newton’s theory became noticeable. In 1845 French
astronomer Leverrier called attention to the fact that the planet
Mercury showed a slight irregularity in its motion inconsistent
with Newton’s law of the inverse square, and too large to be ex-
plained as an error of observation. Fast-moving Mercury— in defi-
ance of Newton— moves round the sun in an orbit which is, at a
first approximation, m ellipse, 0o5er study shows that the position

EINSTEIN

395

of this ellipse undergoes a change in the course of time, so that
the point at which Mercury is nearest the sun (its perihelion) is
not fixed, as the old law stated, but slowly revolving. The greater
part of this revolution is explained by the influence of other plan-
ets. This accounts for an advance of 532 seconds of arc per century.
But the observed amount is 574. The 42 seconds left over, which
had not been satisfactorily accounted for, although numerous
hypotheses had been framed, was taken by Einstein’s theory in its
•' stride. Einstein’s law of gravitation explained the discrepancy in
exactly the amount predicted by the general theory.

This was an achievement which greatly enhanced the probability
of Einstein’s being correct. Calculation showed that there were
other phenomena— problems not solved by Newton— which would
naturally follow as a consequence of the truth of the newer law.

The first of these relates to the bending of light. Einstein pre-
dicted that the mass of the sun would curve the space near it to
such an extent that light from the stars passing through this space
i would be bent. Calculating the deflection of a ray bent by the
, sun, he concluded that it would be twice what the Newtonian theory
I indicated. He accomplished his calculations independently and
alone. It is true that a forgotten young German astronomer, Sold-
I net of Munich, had studied this problem (1805) and arrived at
i the result that light passing near the edge of the sun will be
I bent. Knowing nothing of the labors of Soldner, Einstein was
I led to the same thought. Soldner’s calculations were erroneous,
j claiming that the light would be bent through one second of arc.
i Einstein, however, on the basis of his general theory, claimed that
j the deflection would amount to 1.75 seconds of arc. The total
eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed the accuracy of Einstein’s pre-
dictions. These again were checked and the calculations again con-
firmed at the eclipse of September, 1922. As Einstein’s formula gave
the exact result without upsetting the calculations in any other case,

' the principle of relativity received powerful .support,
j The second test which Einstein proposed for the verification of
i this theory was his prediction of a slight displacement in position
: of the lines in the solar spectrum. In inany ways this proved to be
the most beautiful test of all, for Einsteiil predicted an effect not
only unlooked for by Newton and his theory but wholly unex-

: • ^ ARCHITECTS; OF IDEAS '

; ::plairiable' in any; other way except on the gronnds' of relativity. To;
'verify this ■ was a 'matter' of^ considerable difficulty." However, the
problem was attacked by several astronomers, : As Einstein' does not
work in a vacuum,, the problems he ponders are probed by others;
They came to the conclusion that the displacement toward the
red end of the spectrum, predicted by Einstein was/ despite dis-
turbing effects due to other causes, in just the amount that Einstein"
had stated.

Thus Einstein's theory fits more types of facts than does New-
ton's, and includes all the facts covered by Newton's. It gains in
comprehension but loses in simplicity. Newton created a marvelous
pattern into which facts could be fitted. Einstein created still an-
other pattern into which these same facts, together with others
heretofore neglected, could be fitted. It proved to be uncannily true
and those who were initially hostile to it yielded. His theory stands
confirmed, a memorial to his exact and painstaking industry.

The confirmation of Einstein's predictions again certified to the
world the value of the role of the mathematical theorist in the
realm of the physical sciences. It is small wonder that Galileo and
others called mathematics diume— ''What we can measure we can
know." Mathematics works. Was it not out of pure mathematical
calculation that James Clerk Maxwell predicted wireless waves?
Those invisible rays were not discovered by accident; they were
deduced in 1867 by this English theorist when he demonstrated
that the electromagnetic theory of light implied the possibility
of producing waves invisible to the eye. Twenty years later such
waves were made and measured by Hertz. Ten years later Marconi
used them in telegTaphing to a ship ten miles offshore. By 190^
wireless telegrams were transmitted across the Atlantic, Yet more
was to follow: the wonders of radio, television, the telephoto: prac-
tical results emanating from the highly abstract mathematical equa-
tions of a lone theorist.

Relativity in no way starts with the destruction of old funda-
mental principles but rather corrects prejudices and habits of
thought which have occasioned unnecessary difficulties. Not destruc-
tion, but. ^ revision— extension— ultimate simplification— has been its

EINSTEIN

397

effect. Einstein saw the whole of a vast problem as a coherent
mathematical unity; his daring structure renders the old Newtonian
theory only an approximate one. As Sir Arthur Eddington has said;
“When Einstein overthrew Newton’s theory, he took Newton’s
plant which had outgrown its pot, and transplanted it to a more
open field.”

The end result of Einstein’s thinking leaves the average person
bewildered. Not because it is so difficult but because it is as yet
i so unfamiliar. Newton’s concepts, so well known to us now, must
have seemed completely incomprehensible to the nonscientific when
, first put forward. Relativity must be grasped slowly, imaginatively,

; until what is seen only in flashes becomes a connected part of
I one’s normal intellectual equipment. Patience, time, and familiarity
I will confer understanding. It must be remembered that even so
i elementary a subject as a high school algebra text contains concepts
i which first required the genius of a Descartes to formulate. Einstein
forged a strong chain of reasoning that pulled Newton’s law of uni-
j versal gravitation from its Olympian pedestal. Without the mathe-
1 matical machinery of the tensor calculus (which developed from the
I algebraic work of Cayley and Sylvester) it is improbable that Ein-
i stein could have ever budged the Newtonian theory of gravitation.

;; What of space? Is it curved? Lobatchevsky, Riemann, and other
non-Euclidean mathematicians contended for “curvature of space”
and Einstein’s theory demands it. The conception of space-curva-
ture can be made understandable without the help of the prohibi-
I tively complicated intricacies of higher mathematics. Say, for pur-
j poses of illustration, that you fill your bathtub and lay upon the
i surface of the water a large cake of soap so that it will actually float
i without breaking through the water, so that, in other words, there is
I no displacement of the water. You have now rendered the previ-
i ously flat surface of the water about the soap non-Euclidean (for
the cake of soap has bent the surface into a cusp or depression),
i Suppose now you take a tiny piece of cork and throw it into the
! tub. As long as the cork is not near the soap it occupies a flat or
i Euclidean region of the surface. But if it floats toward the soap
■; it will slowly enter the cusped or non-Euclidean area depressed by
j the comparatively large mass of the soap. By moving into the bent
j area, the piece of cork is forced to yield a portion of its straight

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

39 ®

path and for a time is subjected to a twist while passing through
the cusp. This bathtub illustration helps make clear the contention
of Einstein that space near matter must be curved. The larger the
mass, the greater must be the curvature.* Because Einstein ascribed
curvature of space to the presence of matter in it, he was quite
logical in saying that if there were no matter all space would
be Euclidean.

Simply put, the theory of relativity arrives at the conclusion that
every gravitational field— of the sun, of the earth, of every piece
of matter in the universe— causes curvature of space. A cannon ball
shot through space describes a curve and falls to the earth. The
planets circle around the sun. What does this mean? Simply this:
gravity is not a force acting at a distance as Newton believed but
an effect due to the modification of space in the immediate neigh-
borhood of the body acted upon.

On the basis of the Newtonian teaching the curvatures of the
paths of planets, of tennis balls, of projectiles in general were all
attributed to a “force” of gravitation. Relativity has another inter-
pretation. It dismisses this force as a pure figment of the imagina-
tion. It is the curvature of space, not a supposed force of gravity,
which causes the projectile to fall to the earth in a curved path.
In this way the theory of relativity builds a bridge between geometry
and physics. From the standpoint of the Newtonian theory geometry
precedes physics. With the coming of Einstein geometry is no
longer antecedent to physics but indissolubly fused with it into a
single discipline.

1 1

The very idea of the roundness of the earth— the curvature of its
surface— is rather recent. It took humanity a long time to recognize
it. Why? Because moving on its surface in a given direction one
gets the feeling of traveling in a straight line. Actually, of course,
it is not so; and the proof of it is that if one were to travel on in the
same direction on the earth’s surface he would finally return to his
original point of departure. This demonstrates that the earth is
boundless but not infinite.

; •That is why Einstein predicted that astronomers would find the light rays
of the stars bent near the sun, the bending being greatest near the edge of the
great solar body and decreased farther away from it.

EINSTEIN

399

A basletball hangs in my room. The ball is boundless and the
fly that is now walking round its surface could go on walking freely
for many millions of years without ever finding on the surface of
my basketball a boundary. The surface of the ball is indeed bound-
less but not infinite. To prove that it is not infinite, the surface can
be measured in exact mathematical terms of square inches. As with
the basketball so it is with the earth. The earth is a sphere; it is
curved, although there are still some people who think it flat. If
you are among these living persons who do not believe that the
earth is flat (which the phenomena connected with the existence of
the horizon would quickly disprove), then you are prepared to
understand the far more difficult problem of the noninfinity of the
Einsteinian universe. For just as the earth’s surface, like a curved
plane, bends back upon itself and is boundless but not infinite, so
too is the entire universe. This is the foundation for the statement
of Sir James Jeans that “light and wireless signals travel at the same
rate because, of course, they are essentially the same thing; and this
thing takes a seventh of a second to travel round the world, and
probably something like 100,000 million years to travel round the
Universe.”

As long as men thought of space as Euclidean and time as New-
tonian they were compelled to assume that the universe is infinite.
Once, however, they began to think in terms of relativity it was
obvious that space, being non-Euclidean, is “curved” and that the
universe in consequence is finite in its dimensions. This opens up a
new understanding which profoundly affects our views about the
physical universe.

In similar vein, Einstein’s conception of mass and energy changes

the old-established classical views. Just as space and time are brought
together into a deeper synthesis by the doctrine of relativity, so
mass and energy are connected by the equation E — Mc^ where c is
the velocity of light. Lavoisier’s conservation of matter and Mayer’s
conservation of energy are thus united so that mass and energy are
'■ to be understood as essentially alike— different expressions of the
; same thing, complementary aspects of an underlying imity.

! Whatever may be said of the mathematical difficulties of rela-
i tivity (and they are admittedly great) still those who come, after
I Einstein will forever see natural phenomena in a wholly hew and

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

400

different light. As Darwin changed the thinking of men toward
all things organic, so Einstein has conferred a new understanding
of the nature of the physical world.

Always interested in the spectacular, the public fancy has taken
more to Einstein’s work on relativity than to his less-known but
equally important contributions to atomic physics and radiation—
the especial domain of Max Planck. Very early in his studies in
physics Einstein was attracted to the revolutionary concepts of his
senior colleague, who had done for the microcosm (atom, energy,
atom) what Einstein was to do for the macrocosm (space, time,
matter, gravitation, electromagnetism). In the same year that he
announced to the world the special theory of relativity, Einstein
presented a solution of the photoelectric effect on the basis of
Planck’s quantum. Thus Einstein’s contributions to the quantum
theory have been responsible for much of the marvelous progress
in spectroscopy and atomic structure. Curiously enough, when he
was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921 it was not in recognition of
his work on relativity but for “the discovery of the law of photo-
electric effect.’’ *

Today, Professor Planck is an aged man (eighty years old on
April 25, 1938) laden with distinctions, including the Nobel Prize
which he received in 1919. At a banquet given in his honor sev-
eral years ago, Albert Einstein paid the quantum physicist a memo-
rable tribute: “Many kinds of men devote themselves to science,
and not all for the sake of science herself. There are some who come
into her temple because it offers them the opportunity to display
their particular talents. To this class of men science is a kind of
sport in the practice of which they exult, just as an athlete exults
in the exercise of his muscular prowess. There is another class of
men who come into the temple to make an offering of their brain
pulp in the hope of securing a profitable return. These men are
scientists only by the chance of some circumstance which offered
itself when making a choice of career. If the attending circumstance
had been different they might have become politicians or captains

reason is that the Nobel Prize is given for work in experimental physics.

EINSTEIN

401

o£ business. Should an angel of God descend and drive from the
temple of science all those who belong to the categories I have men-
tioned, I fear the temple would be nearly emptied. But a few wor-
shipers would still remain-some from former times and some from
ours. To these latter belongs our Planck. And that is why we
love him.”

Einstein had been at his tasks in Berlin only a short while when
he married his widowed cousin Elsa, his marriage to his first wife
having been dissolved. Then came tlie World War-a bath of blood
and fire. He refused to have anything to do with it. If the German
scientists wanted to issue a manifesto supporting their government,
he would not join them. “We stand, therefore, at the parting of the
ways. Whether we find the way of peace or continue along the
old road of brute force, so unworthy of our civilization, depends
on ourselves.” Month after month, year after year, he watched the
youth of Germany marching through the streets of Berlin on their
way to the battlefields. No words explain more his depth of suf-
fering than his denunciation of the military system: “That a man
can take pleasure in marching in fours to the strains of a band
is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big
brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot
of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Hero-
ism by order, senseless violence and all the pestilent nonsense that
goes by the name of patriotism-how I hate them! War seems to
me a mean contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces
than take part in such an abominable business.”

These are indeed the passionate and powerful words of a great
moral leader as well as a seer of science. Since the rise of fascism,
and especially since Hitler’s accession to power, Einstein has modi-
fied his views. Today, he is an American citizen having escaped the
inquisitions of a regime that burnt his books, confiscated his prop-
erty and put a price on his head. Seeing in the totalitarian state
a brute attack upon civilization he advocates resistance to evil.
After all, the price of liberty is still eternal vigilance.

No one will claim that the World War solved any problems.
What with millions of men maimed and slaughtered, governments
uprooted, huge property losses sustained, it is no wonder that mis-

402

ARCHITECTS OF IDEAS

ery and: economic depression stalked 'a world full of tlie horrors of
dislocation. Out of the cruel and negative results of the great ■ con-
flict there has emerged" one solid achievement, the " work' of a, soli-
tary, lonely scientist trying to be sane in a world gone mad. The
war 'd the reception of relativity. ' In 1915 Einstein had' fin-

ished his: general theory but communication with the scientists in
: England and France was cut off. Six months after the . armistice was
signed Arthur Eddington headed a British expedition to study the
eclipse of May 29, 1919, in an effort to check Einstein. He did— and
Einstein's theory became the possession of the peaceful international
world of knowledge, science and philosophy.

Shortly before his fiftieth birthday Einstein, still in Berlin (1929)^
presented to the Prussian Academy of Sciences a brief communica-
tion, less than six pages of print, entitled Toward a Unified Field
Theory, For ten years he had been at work on its vast complexities
in an effort to achieve a new synthesis of his own theories. The
original special theory of relativity dealt with phenomena occur-
ring in the electromagnetic field of visual events. The general theory
is an extension of the special, concerned chiefly with occurrences
in the gravitational field. (The two theories involve the use of radi-
cally different systems of mathematical equations.) With the an-
nouncement of the unified field theory, the world of aroused public
interest realized that Einstein had initiated a bold attempt to com-
bine the conceptions of electromagnetism and gravitation in a logi-
cal and inherent unity. Just as heat waves and light waves and radio
waves may be regarded as variations of wave phenomena, so his nu-
merous (and as yet unsuccessful) attempts to achieve a unified theory
are based upon the belief that electromagnetism and gravitation are
manifestations of one and the same thing. If experiment shall ulti-
mately demonstrate its essential accuracy the unified theory prom-
ises to be ''the greatest merger ever effected in human thought/'

As a result of the labors of Einstein and Planck, theoretical
physics is now divided into the domain of microscopical phenom-
ena, covered largely by the quantum theory, and the realm of the
macroscopical which the formulae of relativity unite and explain.
The next stupendous advance in science is destined to bring these

EINSTEIN

403.

two theories together. Already there, are foreshadoxvings, as yet
unpicturable and unimaginable. Eddington and Dirac are promi-
nent among those seeking this newer world.

And Einstein too.

Like the aged king Ulysses of Tennyson’s poem, Albert Einstein
sits at Princeton, the white-haired monarch of all theorists— of those
who have died and of those who are living. As in the days of his
youth he still loves his ships and sailing craft, for they are symbols
of far-off adventure in an expanding universe. And he has convinced'
others too that his doctrine of an expanding universe is a significant
consequence of his theory of relativity: de Sitter, Eddington, Jeans,
Lemaitre, Hubble. . . .

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners.

Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought xvith me—

. . . Come, my friends,

’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THEORIES

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The Foundatio 7 is of Science, Henri Poincare. Trans, from French. NeW'
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Science and the Human Mind, W. C. D. Wetham. London,

The Art of Thought, Graham Wallas. New York, 1926.

An Introduction to the History of Science, Walter Libby. Boston, 1917.
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The Domain of Natural Science, E. W. Hobson. Aberdeen, 19^^*

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The Nature of Physical Theory, P. W. Bridgman. Princeton University
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Introduction to the History of Science, George Sarton. Baltimore, 1927.
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The Scientific Habit of Thought, Frederick Barry. New York, 1927.

The Nature of Hypothesis, Myron L. Ashley. Chicago University, 1903.
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Science and the Human Temperament, Ermn Schrodingcx, Trans, from
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The Story of Human Error, Edited by Joseph Jas trow. New York, 1936.
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40s

4o6

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THEORY OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

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ON GALILEO, BRUNO, ETC..-'

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general:

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The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory. Dorothy Stimson.
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The History of the Warfare of Science with Theology. Andrew D.
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„,ON HUTTON:. ‘ ,

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API

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; . ON WERNER:

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Geschichte und Literatur der Geognosie, C. Keferstein, Halle, 1840.

■ general:

Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory. John Playfair. Edinburgh, 1802.
History of Geology. H. B. Woodward. New York, 1911.

The Earth and Its History. J. H. Bradley. New York, 1928.

A Comparative View of the Huttonian and Neptunian Systems of
Geology. Edinburgh, 1802.

Geology from Original Sources. Agar, Flint and LongwelL New York,
1929.

Errors of Geology. John Kelly. London, 1864.

Mineralogy and Geology. Parker Cleaveland. Boston, 1816.

*‘On Theories of the Earth,’' ch. 46 in A System of Geology. John Mac-
cuiioch. London, 1831.

Series of Experiments Shewing the Effects of Compression in Modifying
the Action of Heat. James Hall. Edinburgh, 1805.

The Story of Geology. A, L. Benson. New York, 1927.

THEORY OF THE STRUCTURE OF MATTER

DALTON: „

Life of Dalton. W. C. Henry. London, 1884.

John Dalton. L. J. Neville-Polley. London, 1920.

The Makers of Chemistry. E. J. Holmyard. Oxford, iggi.

A New View of the Origin of Dalton's Atomic Theory. Roscoe and
Harden. London, 1896.

Famous Chemists. E. Roberts. London,,. -19 11-
History of Chemistry. F. J. Moore. New York, 1931.

Makers of Science. Ivor B. Hart. London, 1924.^ , _

Essays in Historical Chemistry. E. Thorpe., London* 1931.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

general:

Corpuscular Theories of Matter/' ch. 7 in The Domain of Science,
E. W. Hobson. Aberdeen,' 192s.

The Corpuscular Theory of Matter, J. J. Thomson. New York, 1907.
Atom and Cosmos, Hans Reichanbach. New York, 1933.

A Short History of Atommn. ], C, Gregory, London, ig$i.

Recent Developments in Atomic Theory, C. G. Darwin. Oxford, 1927.
The A. B, C. of Atoms, B. Russell. London, 1923.

J. J. Thomson. Oxford, 1914.

Modern Theories in Chemistry, L. Meyer. London, 1888.

Architecture of the Universe, W. F. G. Swann. New York, 1934.

The Electron in Chemistry, J. J. Thomson. London, 1923.

The Drama of Chemistry, S. J. French. New York, 1937.

THEORY OF FIRE

ON LAVOISIER:

“Lavoisier,’' ch. 21 in Master Minds in Medicine. ], C. Hemmeter. New
York, 1927.

Life of Lavoisier. Mary Foster. Smith College Monographs No. 1. (1926).
iLat;oi^ier. J. A. Cochrane. London, 1931.

Crusaders of Chemistry. J. N. Leonard. New York, 1930.

Antoine Lavoisier, Donglsis McKie, hondon, ig$^,

ON stahl:

The Study of Chemical Composition. Id^ Freund. Cambridge, 1904-
Das Buck Der Grossen Chemiker, Vol. I. Gunther Bugge. Berlin, 1929.
The Chemistry of Combustion. J. N. Friend. London, 1922.

The History of Biology. Erik Nordenskiold. Trans, from Swedish. New
York, 1928.

ON PRIESTLEY:

Joseph Priestley. E. T. Thorpe, London, 1906.

Three Philosophers, W. R. Aykroyd. London, 1935.

Crucibles: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Chemists, Bernard
Jaffee, New York, 1930.

The History of the Phlogiston Theory, J. H. White, London, 1932,

/ /The Phlogiston Theory in Chemistry/’ chap. I of Book IV in A History
of Science, tienry Smith Williams. New York, 1904,

BIBLIOGRAPHY

409

Alchemy: Child of Greek Philosophy. Arthur J. Hopkins. Columbia

, University Press, 1934. . .

The Story, of Early Chemistry. J. M. Stillman. New York, 19^4.' : :

Famous Chemists. W. A. Tilden. London, 1921.

■Prelude to Chemistry. John Read. New" York, 1937.

The History of Chemistry from the Earliest Times. J. C. Brown. 2nd
Ed. Philadelphia, 1920.

Essays in Historical Chemistry. E. Thorpe. London, 1931.'

History of Chemical Theories and Laws. M, M. P, 'Muir. New York,

'igO'Yv,

A: History of Chemical Theory. A. Wurtz. Trans, from French.' London,
1869.

THEORY OF HEAT

onrumford:

Memoir of Sir Benjamin Thompson. G. E. Ellis. Boston, 1871.

General Gage's htformers. Allen French. Ann Arbor, 1932.

Count Rumford of Massachusetts. J. A. Thompson. New York, 1935.
**Count Rumford,’' in New Fragments. John Tjndzll. London, 1898.
The Royal Institution: Its Founder and its First Professors. Bence Jones.
London, 1871.

oN'MAYer: :

**The Copley Medalist of 1871,'' in VoL I. Fragment 0/ Science. John
Tyndall. 6th Ed. London, 1899.

‘^Robert MRyerT in Trail Blazers of Science. Martin Gumpert Trans.

from German. New York, 1936.

/. Bo&ere Mayer. Bernhard HelL St^^

general:.'"

Theory of Heat. Thomas Preston. 4th Ed. London, 1929.

Heat. P. G. Tait. London, 1904.

Mechanical Theory of Heat. R. S. McCulloch. New York, 1876.

Heat as a Mode of Motion. John Tyndall. New York, 1863.

An Outline of the Theory of Thermodynamics. Edgar Buckingham.

■vr'/:;'r:New;:::YO'rk 'r,/-;

The General Theory of Thermodynamics. J. E. Trevor. New York, 1927.
Heat and Thermodynamics. J. K. Roberts. London, 1933.

The Correlation and Conservation of Forces. Grove, Helmholtz, Mayer,

Theories of Energy. Horace Perry. New York, i.g'iS.

Theory of Heat Max Planck. Trans., .from German. London, 1932.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THEORY OF LIGHT

. on: HUYGENS: ,

. A History- of Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. /A,
^ ' W London, 1935.

^Ghristiaaii' Huygens.” Florian Cajori in Scientific Monthly (March,
1929).

Oeuvres Completes, Published by the Society of Science of Holland. The
Hague, 1888.

'']fGreat Men of Science, Philip Lenard. Trans, from German. New York,
^ 933 -

Le Sejour de Christiaan Huygens d Paris, H. L, Brugmans. Paris, 1955.

ON newton:

Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton, David Brewster. Edinburgh, 1885.

Sir Isaac Newton, Selig Brodetsky. London, 1927.

Essays on the Life and Work of Newton. Augustus de Morgan, Chicago,
1914.

Matter and Gravity in Newton's Physical Philosophy, A. J. Snow. New
York, 1926.

ON YOUNG AND FRESNEL!

‘Thomas Young's Place in the History of the Wave Theory of Light.”
Henry Crew in The Journal of the Optical Society of America, Vol.
20 (Jan. 1930).

“Epoch of Young and Fresnel,” in Vol. II, History of the Inductive
Sciences. William Whewell, 3rd Ed. New York, 1875.

Life of Dr, Young. G. Peacock. London, 1855.

Oeuvres Completes d' Augustin Fresnel, Paris, 1866-70.

ON FARADAY;

Faraday as a Discoverer, John Tyndall. London, 1870.

Michael Faraday, W. L. Randell. London, 1924.

Life and Letters of Faraday, H. B. Jones, London, 1870,

ON maxwell:

James Clerk Maxwell and Modern Physics, R. T. Glazebrook. London,

La Theorie de Maxwell, H. Poincare. Paris, 1899.

The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, Campbell and Garnett, London, 1882,

. James Clerk Maxwell A Commemorative Volume, Cambridge, 1931.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

41 1 •

ON hertz:

The Work of Hertz, Oliver J., Lodge. London, 1898.

Great Men of Science, Philip Lenard. Trans, from German. New York,

, 4933 -

Pioneers of Wireless, Ellison Hawkes. London, 19^7.

Tioneers of Electrical Communication, Rollo Appleyard. London, 1950.

ON. PLANCK:

^‘Max .Planck: A Biographical, Sketch.” James Murphy in Lfftere is
Science Going? Max Planck. New York, 1932.

Max Planck als Forscher, Albert Einstein. Berlin, 1913.

general:

Theory of Light, R. C. Maclaurin. Cambridge, 1908.

The Wave Theory of Light, Humphrey Lloyd. London, 1837.

Optical Theories, D. N, Mallik. Cambridge, 1921.

Six Lectures on Light, John Tyndall. London, 1873.

‘'The Ether Theories of Electrification.” Fernando Sanford. Scientific
Monthly, Vol. 24 (1922).

The Electromagnetic Theory of Light, C. E. Curry. London, 1905.
Optics. Isaac Newton. (Reprinted from the 4th Ed. with a foreword by
Albert Einstein). London, 1931.

Treatise on Light, Christiaan Huygens. (Rendered into English by
Silvanus P. Thompson). London, 1912.

The Revolution in Physics, Ernst Zimmer. Trans, from German, Lon-
don, 1936.

"Particles and Waves.” H. B. Lemon in The World and Man, F, R.
Moulton (Editor). New Y^ork, 1937.

"What is Light?” Arthur H. Compton in Scientific Monthly, (April,
1929,)

The Qiiantum and Its Interpretation, H. S. Allen. London, 1928.

The Quantum Theory, Fritz Reiche. Trans, from German. New York,

Waves and Ripples in Water, Air, and Aether. J. A. Fleming. London,

A History of the Theories of Aether, E. T. Whittaker. London, 1910,

THEORY OF POPULATION

ON MALTHUS:

Malthus and His Work, James Bonar. London, 1,885., ^ v

Essays in Biography, John Mt, Keynes. London^ i 933 *

bibliography:

; 4 i :;2

‘‘Maltliiis: . A Revaluation.”' Ezra Bowen. Article in .Scientific. Monthly^
■ VoL 30 (Jan.-June 1930) . ■'

Papulation Problems of the Age of Malthus. G. Talbot Griffith. Cam”

ON GODWIN:

‘'William : Godwin” (an essay). William Hazlitt in Spirit of the Age,
London, 1825.

The Life of William Godwin. F. K. Brown. London, 1926.

Shelley j Godwin, and Their Circle. H. N. Brailsford. London, 1913.
William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries. C. K. Paul, Boston,
1876. '

ON plage:

Life of Francis Place. Graham Wallas. London, 1898.

Place on Population. Norman E. Himes. London, 1930.

The Early Propagandist Movement in English Population Theory.

James A. Field. Eul. Amer. Economic Assoc. 4th Series, 1911.
Medical History of Contraception. Norman E. Himes. Baltimore, 1936.
Pioneers of Birth Control. Victor Robinson. New York, 1919.

ON GALLON :

Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton. Karl Pearson. Vol. I, Cam-
bridge, 1914; Vol II, Cambridge, 1924-
Great Biologists. J. Arthur Thomson. London, 1932.

“Francis Galton,” in Introduction to Biology and Other Papers. A. B.
Darbishire. New York, 1917.

.general:'-:, .

World Population. A. M. Carr-Saunders. Oxford, 1936.

Population Problems. W. S. Thompson. New York, 1935.

Heredity and Environment in the Development of Man. E. G. Conklin,
Princeton, 1920.

Nature and Nurture. L. T. Hogben. New York, 1933.

Mankind at the Crossroads. E. M. East. New York, 1923.

The Early American Reaction to the Theory of Malthus. George J.
Cady. Chicago, 1931.

Pre-Malthusian Doctrines of Population. C, E. Strangeland. New York,

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ON SCHWANN:

THEORY OF THE CELL

Manifestation en UHonneur de M. Le Professeur TL Schwann. Bmseh
dorf, 1879.

The Great Biologists. J. Arthur Thomson. London, 1932.

Biology and its Makers. W. A. Locy. 3rd Ed. New York,, 19.15.

Makers of Modern^ Medicine. J. J. Walsh. New .York, 1907.

*‘ScMeideii and Schwann/' ch. 18 in Pathfinders in Medicine. Viaoi
Robinson. New York, 1929.

ON WOLFF:

"‘Caspar Friedrich Wolff and the Theoria Generationis/' W. M., Wheeler
in Biological Lectures of Wood's Holl. Boston, 1899.

"‘Kaspar Friedrich Wolff/' in Trail Blazers of Science. Martin Gumpert
Trans, from German. New York, 1936.

ON HALLER, BONNET:

Early Theories of Sexual Generation. F. J. Cole. Oxford, 1930.
Growth of Biology. W. A. Locy. New York, 1925.

ON HOOKE, GREW, ETC.:

History of Botany. Julius von Sachs. Trans, from German. Oxford, 1890.
"‘The Biological Sciences," ch. 18 in History of Science. A. Wolf.
London, 1935.

The Early Naturalists. L. C. MialL London, 1912.

ON, MENDEL::'',

“Mendel the Man." Paul Fopenoe. Journal of Heredity. VoL 16 (1925).
The Physical Basis of Heredity. T. H. Morgan. Philadelphia, 1919.

Life of Mendel Hugo litis. Trans, from German. New York, 1932.

general: '".."V'v' ' ' ■

Cell in Development and Inheritance. E. B. Wilson. 3rd Ed. New York,

Historie des Origines de la Theorie Cellulaire. Marc Klein. Paris, 1936.
The Cell Doctrine, James Tyson. Philadelphia, 1878.

Science and Human Affairs. W. C. Curtis. New York, 1922.

“The Rise of Genetics." T. H. Morgan. Science. Vol. 76. p. 261 (1932).
“Human Genetics and Human Ideals."' ’J. B. S. Haldane in Scientific
Progress. New York, 1936.

“Heredity and Human Affairs." L. Hogbenin Science Today. J. Arthur
Thomson (Editor) . London, 1934.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

: 4 ^: 4 '

Theory of the Gene. T. H. Morgan. Yale University Press, 1926. .

Human Genetics, and its Social Import. S. J. Holmes. New York, 1936.

THEORY OF EVOLUTION

ON DARWIN*.

The Evolution of Charles Darwin. G. A. Dorsey. New York, 1927.
Darwin. Gamaliel Bradford. Boston,' 1926.'

Charles Darwin and the Theory of Natural Selection. . B. Pouiton.
London, 1896.

Charles Darwin. C. F. Holden. New York, 1891. ■

Darwin and the Humanities. ]. M. Baldwin. London, 1910.

ON Darwin's predecessors:

Pioneers of Evolution. E. Clodd. London, 1897.

.From ihe Greeks to Darwin. H. F. Osborn. New York, 1894.

ON WALLACE:

Alfred Russel Wallace. L. T. Hogben. London, 1918.

Impressions of Great Naturalists. H. F. Osborn. New York, 1925.

My Life. Alfred Russel Wallace, New York, 1905.

C 7 'eation: A History of Non-Evolutionary Theories. E. T. Brewster.
Indianapolis, 1927.

The History of Biological T/zeorie^., Emanuel Radi.' irom: Ger-
man. Oxford, 1930.

Darwin and Modern Science. A. G. Seward. Cambridge, 1909.

A Critique of ike Theory of Evolution. T. H. Morgan. Princeton, 1916.
Darwinism. Alfred Russel Wallace. London, 1891,

Darwinism Today. Vernon L. Kellog. New York, 1908.

The First Principles of Evolution. S. Herbert. London, 1919.

Modern Theories of Development. L. von Bertalanffy. Trans, from Gen
man. Oxford, 1933.

The Theory of Evolution. . B. Scott. New York, 1918.

Darwin^ s Theory Applied to Mankind. Alfred MacMn. London, 1937.
Evolution and its Modern Critics. A, M. Davies, London, 1937*

BIBLIOGRAPHY

415

THEORY OF THE ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION

OF HISTORY

ON MARX:

From Hegel to Marx. Sidney Hook. New York, 1936.

Karl Klarx. Franz Mehring. New York, 1935..

Marx und Hegel G. Fischer. Jena, 1922.

Karl Marx and Engels. D. Riazanov. 'New York, 1927.

:Karl Marx: Fits Life and Work. Otto Ruble. Trans, fro'm. German. New .

, ^ York, 1929.

Karl Marx. Harold J., Laski. London, 1922.

Karl Marx. Raymond Postgate. London, 1933.

Proudhon et Karl Marx. E. Drumont. Paris, 1901.

general:

Karl Marx's Interpretation of History. M. M. Bober. Harvard University
Press. 1927.

The Theoretical System of Karl Marx. L. B. Boudin. Chicago, 1910.
What Afarx Really Meant. G. D. H. Cole. New York, 1934.

Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx. Sidney Hook. New York,

Le Determinisme Economique. Paul Lafargue. Paris, 1907.

Essays in the History of Materialism. G. V. Plekhanov. Trans, from
Russian. London, 1934.

The Economic Interpretation of History. Henri See. Trans, from French.
New York, 1929,

Aspects of Dialectical Materialism. H. Levy and J. Macmurray. London,

"The Economic Determination of History.” Harry Elmer Barnes in
Essays in Intellectual History. New York, 1929.

Karl Marx als Geschichtsphilosoph. Alfred Braunthal. Berlin, 1920.

The Economic Interpretation of History. J. E. T. Rogers. New York,

1888.

THEORY OF DISEASE

ON Pasteur:

The Genius of Louis Pasteur. Piers Compton. New York, 1932.

Life of Pasteur. R. Vallery-Radot. Trans, from French. New York, 1923.
"Pasteur,” cli. 22 in Master Minds in Medicine. J. C. Hemmeter. New
York, 1927. ■ ‘

/Tonis Pasteur,” in New Fragments. John Tyndall. London, 1898.;* ,

Pasteur and His Work. L. Descour. /Tram. ■■from French. London, 1922.^

BIBLIOGRAPHY

|l6

ON FRAGASTORIUS, KIRGHER^.ETC.:

Stalkers of Pestilence. Wade W. Oliver. New York^ ^ 93 ^*

Great Biologists. J. Arthur Thomson. London, 1932.

Catholic Churchmen in Science. J. J. Walsh. Philadelphia, 1906.

general:

'‘The Origin of' Syphilis/' chap. 22 in Essays in the History of Med-
icine. KbiI Sudhoff. Trans, from German. New York, 1926.

' The History and Epidemiology of Syphilis. William A. Pusey. Baltimore,
^ 933 -

“The Germ Theory/' chap. 5 in A Hundred Years of Medicine. W. E.

B. Lloyd. London, 1936.

Pasteur and Rabies. T. M. Dolan. London, 1890.

Lord Lister. "K. Godlee. London, 1917.

“Micro-organisms and Their Roles in Nature." William H. Taliaferro
in The World and Man. F. R. Moulton (Editor). New York, 1937.
Man vs. Microbes. N. Kopeloff. New York, 1930.

On Fermentation. Paul Schiitzenberger, 1893.

THEORY OF THE MIND

ON FREUD:

An Autobiographical Study. Sigmund Freud. Trans, from German. Lon-
don, 1935.

Past Masters and Other Papers. Thomas Mann. Trans, from German,
New York, 1933.

Freud, Goethe, Wagner. Thomas Mann. New York, 1937.

Freud and Marx. Reuben Osborn. London, 1937.

Collected Papers. Sigmund Freud. New York, 1924.

“Sigmund Freud in His Historical Setting" (article). C. G. Jung. Char-
acter and Personality. Vol. I. Durham, 1932.

Freud and His Time. Fritz Wittels. Trans, from German. New York,

New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. S. Freud. Trans, from Ger-
man. New York, 1933*

Psycho-analysis: Its Theories and Practical Application. A. A. Brill, Phil-
: \ adelphia, 1923,

’ The House That Freud Built. J. Jastrow. New York, 1932.

_*Treud's-Thebry,,of Wit,".A. A, Brill in Journal of Abnormal Psychology . '

BIBLIOGRAPHY

417

Facts and Theories of Psychoanalysis. Ives Hendrick. New York, 1934.
Address on Psycho-analysis. J. J. Putnam. London, 1921.

Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud. London, 1930.

The Interpretation of Dreams. Sigmund Freud. Trans, by A. A. Brill.
London, 1927.

Introduction to Psycho-analysis for Teachers. Anna Freud. Trans, from
German. London, 1931.

Wish-hunting in the Unconscious. M. Harrington. New York, 1934.
Papers on Psycho-analysis. Ernest Jones. London, 1923.

THEORY OF THE ORIGIN OF OUR PLANET

ON CHAMBERLIN:

“A Distinguished Son of Wisconsin” (article) . George Coolie in Wiscon-
sin Magazine. Vol. 15 (1932).

“Professor Chamberlin” (article). J. V. Nash in Open Court Magazine.
Vol. 42 (1928).

“The Sunset of a Great Life” (article). J. V. Nash in Open Court Mag-
azine. Vol. 43 (1929) .

Thomas C. Chamberlin. B. Willis in Annual Report of tire Smithsonian
Institution. Washington, 1929.

Chamberlin and Salisbury: Life Partners. Collie and Densmore. Madison,

1932-

Biographical Memoir of Thomas C. Chamberlin. W. T. Chamberlin.
Washington, 1934.

“Chamberlin’s Work in Wisconsin.” C. K. Leith in Journal of Geology.
Vol. 37 (May-June 1929) .

ON KANT AND LAPLACE:

Immanuel Kant. Papers read at Northwestern University on the bi-
centenary of Kant’s birth. Chicago, 1925.

Kant’s Cosmogony: W. Hastie. Glasgow, 1900.

A Source Book in Astronomy. Shapley and Howarth. New York, 1929-
Modern Cosmogonies. A. M. Clerke, London, 1905.

The Great Astronomers. H. S. Williams. New York, 1930.

A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century. A. M.
Clerke. Edinburgh, 1885.

The Growth of the Earth. T, C. Chamberlin. New York,, 1927.

Two Solar Families. T. C. Chamberlin, Chicago, 1928. ;

BIBLIOGRAPHY

'418

' “The' Origin and' History of the Earth/’ T. C. Chamberlin in The World
and Man, F., A. Moulton .(Editor). New York, ^ 937 *'

. . '.Outlines, of Historical Geology, Chzrlts Schuchbert. New York, 1931.
Astronomy and Cosmogony, J. H. Jeans. Cambridge, 1929.

The Origin of the Earth, T. C. Chamberlin. University Chicago Press:
1916.'

The Life of the Universe: As Conceived by Man from the Earliest Ages
to the Present Time, 2 Vols. Svante Arrhenius. Trans, from Swedish.
London, 1909.

The Nebular Hypothesis and Modern Cosmogony (The Hailey Lec-
ture). J. H. Jeans. Oxford, 1923.

Astronomy for the Millions, G. Van Den Bergh. Trans, from the Dutch.
New York, 1937.

Flights from Chaos, Harlow Shapley. New York, 1930.

Star and Planets: Exploring the Universe. Id. H. Menzel. New York,
1931.

THEORY OF MAN

ON boas:

“Franz Boas.” Richard Andree in Globus, Nol. 82, p. 306 (1902).

“Franz Boas and the American School of Historical Ethnology.” A.
Goldenweiser in The History and Prospects of the Social Sciences,
H. E. Barnes (Editor). New York, 1925.

“Professor Franz Boas.” Ruth Benedict in The Scientific Monthly, Voh
32, pp. 278-280 (March, 1931).

“Franz Boas,” in American Men of Science, New York, 1933.

ON GOBINEAU:

“Arthur, Count of Gobineau, Race Mystic.” J. M. Hone in Contempo-
rary Review, Vol. 104, p. 94-103 (1913) .

“Gobinism,” ch. 3 in Racial Basis of Civilization. F. H. Hankins. New
York, 1926.

“Gobineau,” ch. 4 in Race: A Study in Modern Superstition, Jacques
Barzun. New York, 1937.

History of Anthropology, A. C. Haddon. New York, 1910.

Race and Culture Contacts, E. B. Reuter (Editor). New York, 1934.

; We Europeans, J. S. Huxley and A. C. Haddon. New York, 1936.

"‘A Hundred Years of Anthropology, T. K. Pennimam London, 1935.
What is Man? J. Arthur Thomson, New York, 1924.

BIBLIOGRAPHY,

4^,.9

Apes, Men mid Morons, E. A. Hooton. New. 'York, 1937., ■

The Racial History' of Man, R. B. Dixon. .New York, 1923.

The Mind of Primitive Man, Franz Boas. New .York.

Aryan mnd Non-Aryan' (a lecture). Franz Boas. New, York, 1934.' ...

Race Differences. Otto Kleinberg. New York, 1935.

Anthropology and Modern Life. Franz Boas. New York, 193s. ■

“Pope Pius III. and the American Indians.’^' Lewis Hanke in. Harvard
Theolog'ical Review. VoL 30. No. 2 (April, .1937) • '

Race: A Study in Modern Superstition. Jacques Barzun. New York, 1937.
THEORY OF RELATIVITY'

ON, EINSTEIN;

Einstein the Searcher. A. Moskowski. London, 19211.

Albert Einstein. Anton Reiser. New York, 1930.

Contemporary Immortals. A. Henderson. New York, 1930.

Albert Einstein. D. Reichinstein. Prague, 1934.

Einstein Visits New York. Scrapbook mounted and bound by the New
York Public Library, 1933.

Master Mhtds of Modern Science. Bridges and Tiitman. New York, 1935.
Living Philosophies. Albert Einstein, et al. New York, 1931.

ON NEWTON,:.

'The Newtonian Synthesis,’' ch. 7 in J History of Science. A. Wolf.
London, 1935.

"Newton.” Albert Einstein in Annual Report Smithsonian Institution.
1927.

The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science. E. H. Burtt.
New York, 1927.

ON POINCARE, MACH, ETC,:

A Source Book in Mathematics. D. E. Smith. New York, 1929.

Henri Poincare. Robert d’Adhemar. Paris, 1914*

Major Prophets of Today. Edwin E. Slosson. Boston, 1914*

Men of Mathematics. E. T. Bell. New York, 1937-

"Prof. Mach and His Work.” Paul Carus in The Monist^Nol. 21 (1911) .

general: ■ - '

Easy Lessons in Einstein. E. E. Slosson. New York, 1921.^

Einstein and the Universe. Chas. Nordmann. New York, 1922.

The Theory Af Relativity. H. L. Brose. Oxford, 1920.'^^

Philosophy and Modern Science. H, T. Davis. Bloomington, 1931. -

BIBLIOGRAPHY

;.: 42 :o

The Nature of ' the Physical World, A; S. Eddington. New York, 1929.
The World As I See It: Albert Einstein. New York, 1934.

The New. Physics, Arthur Haas. ^ Trans, from. German. New York, 1934.
./'The Fundamental Concepts of Physics, P. R.Heyl. Baltimore, .1926.
'[The.: Expanding Universe, A. S. Eddington. New York, 1933.,

'[The Philosophy of Relativity, A, P. Ushenko. London, 1937.

The Philosophy of Physics, M, Planck. Trans, from German. New York,
1936.

INDEX

I Adler, Alfred, 326
Agassiz, .Louis, 61
, Alphonse X, 14, 16
: Anaxagoras, 18
' Anaximander, ' 2 1 1
’ Aquinas, St. Thomas, 334
Arago, D. F., 154!

[ Arion, 2.89

Aristarchus, 6, 11, 19
Aristotle, 47 £, 73, 98, 171, 185,
! ' 211 i, 216, 363, 367

1 Augustine, St., 251, 333

Bacon, Francis, 4, 60, 122, 160, 380
Bacon, Roger, 77
Bakunin, M., '264, 266, 268, 270
! Bauer, Bruno, 246, 255, 266
I Becquerel, Henri, 95
Beecher, J. J., loo f.
j Bernard, Claude,; 116 .

; Bernheim, Dr., 310 £, '318
Berthollet, Claude, 86 £, 94
; Berzelius, J. J., 88 £, 92 £

}' Besant, Annie, 183 £
j Biot, J. B., 94, 155, 281, 282
[ Black, Joseph, 69, 113
I Bleuler, Eugen, 327
i Blondus, Flavius, 252
j Boas, Franz, 364 £
j Bodin, Jean, 368

Bolyai, Johann, 386 _ " ■

j Bonnet, Charles, 194 £,197, 214

Boyle, Robert, 75, 77!., 83, ici,
105, 127, 132

Bradlaugh, Charles, 183 £

Brahe, Tycho, 43 £ ,

Bragg, Sir Wm,, 97, 161
Breuer, Josef, 308 £, 312, 316, 318
Brill, Dr. A. A., 327
Brougham, Lord, 153
Brown, Robert, 201
Brucke, Ernst, 304
Brudzewski, Albert, 16
Bruno, Giordano, 32 £, 43
Buffon, George, 55 £, 202, 215,

336 f-

Bui wer, Edward Lytton, 165
Burnet, Thomas, 51
Butler, Samuel, 202

Carlile, Richard, 183
Calixtus III, 144
Carlyle, Thomas, 8, 253
Carpenter, Edward, 313
Carr-Saunders, Prof. A. M., 173
Cassini, 65
Cavaignac, 261

Cavendish, Henry, 75, 82, 113, 127
Chamberlain, Houston S., 360 £
Chamberlin, Thomas C., 70, 337,
34a f.

Charcot, J, M., 305 f., 307, 316, 319
Co£ 5 nhal, 119

INDEX

42:2

Columbus, 123, S72, ^ 37.9

■ Gondorcet, 108, 163, 164, 252
Copernicus,. 5, , 15 i, 71, 122,- 127,

: 237, ,241, 326, 331, 336
-Cuvier, 94, 215

'Dalton, John, 77, 80 i, loi, 113,
158, 201, 387
Dante, 47, 360, 363
Dantiscus, 29 ,

Darwin, Charles, 6, 8, 24, 66, 69,
113, 127, 137, 173, 185, 192, 202,
213, 216, 218 £., 241, 254, 256,
265, 269, 303, 326 L, 351 f., 364,
400

Darwin, Erasmus, 202, 215, 220
Davaine, Dr., 293 £.

Da Vinci, Leonardo, 50 £., 83, 123,

361

Davy, Humphry, 93, 133 £., 136, 156
De Broglie, Louis, 96, 159
Defoe, Daniel, 369
Descartes, Ren^ 4, 132, 145, 154,

213. 335 f-. 385. 397

De Sitter, 403
Diderot, 247, 361
Dirac, Prof., 97, 403
Dumas, Alexandre, 298
Dumas, J. B., 280, 289
Dupont, E. L, 109 f.

Dupont, Pierre Samuel, 108 f.
Duret, Claude, 218

Eckersall, Harriet, 171
Eddington, Sir Arthur, 157, 397,
402, 403

Einstein, Albert, 8, 23, 157, 159,

Ellis, Havelock,, 313, 327, 331, 362

Empedocles, 98, 116, 211 ,

Euclid, 1 1, 381 £, 385 £, 397
Euripides, 367

Faraday, Michael, 156 £

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 245 £

Foucault, J. B. L., 150, 155
Fourier, 247

Fracastorius, 272 £, 276, 284 ■.
France, Anatole, 103
Franklin, Benj., 109, 123, 364
Frederick, the Great, 57
Freising, Otto, 251
Fresnel, Augustin, 113, 154 £,159
Freud, Sigmund, 8, 24, 302 £
Froude, J. A., 253

Gage, General T., 126
Galileo, 26, 38 £, 78, 122, 146, 160,
189, 301, 336, 371, 394, 396
Galton, Francis, 185 £, 210
Gauss, K. F., 386
Gay-Lussac, 91 £, 93, 94
Gegenbauer, Karl, 206
Geikie, A., 55
George, Henry, 170
Germain, Lord, 1 29 £

Gilbert, Wm., 122 £

Gobineau, Count Arthur, 356 £,
364, 366, 372

Godwin, Wm., 163, 164 £, 179, i8i
Goethe, 303, 362, 375, 376
Gough, John, 8i £, 83
Grant, Madison, 362
Gray, Asa, 231

Grew, Nehemiah, 190, 191 £
Guizot, ',F..

^Gunther#':,;HaHSy.:36i;:;£:;:;;::':;^^^^

'"Hap,;; Sir;!' ;

Haller, Albrecht,,, 193, £, 195 £, 197,:

INDEX

j Harvey, Wm., 122, 329, 336,

!i Hauser, Otto, 361 ,

Hazlitt, Will., 165 .

I Hegel, G, W. F., 241 f., 252 £. ,

' Heine.,. Heinrich, 248, 266
I Heisenberg, Werner, 97, 147, 159
i Helmholtz, Hermann, 137, 1421,

153

Helvetius., C. A., ,179, 247
' Heraclitus, gS
^ Herodotus,' 47, 250 L
; Hertz, Heinrich, 158, 396
i Hesiod, 332
; Hicetas, 19

Higgins, Bryan, 113
? Higgins', Wm., 113
1' Hipparchus,^ I'l f.

<. Hitler, Adolf, 358, 362, 401
f Flobbes, , Thomas, 132 '„

: Holbach, Paul, 247
' Hooke, Robert, 132, 190 £

Hooker, Joseph, 219, 229, 231, 233
[ Hrdli'cka,. Ales, 362
; Hume, ' David, 163, 164, 172, 178,

I 213

j Hutton, James, 8, 46, 49, 55^ 57£,

127, 331^ 342

I Fluxley, Thomas, 69, 174, 194, 219,
i 2331,283

I Huygens, Christiaan, 127, 145 1 ,
i ^57^3159,161

I Ibn Khaldun, 252 ■

I Jameson, R., 61
! Janssen, Z., 189
' Jeans, Sir James, 349 1 , 399, 403'
Jeffers, Robinson, 330
' Jeffreys, Harold, 349 1
^ ' ' Jenner, Edward, 295 1 , 299
Joule, J. P., 137, 142 £ , ^

Joyce, James, 330
Jung, C. G., 327

Kant, Immanuel, 59, 82, 153, 332,

337 f- 344» 3^^

Kassowitz, Max, 307
Kelvin, Lord, 111, 137
Kepler, 38, 43 £, 93, 122, 385
Khayyam, Omar, 74
Kingsley, Chas., 68, 233, 236
Kircher, Athanasius, 275, 276
Kirwan, Richard, 61
Klingenstierna, S., 190
Knowlton, Dr. Chas., 183, 185
Koch, Robert, 294, 299
Koller, Dr., 302
Krafft-Ebing, 313

Lafargue, Paul, 243
La Fayette, 136

Lamarck, J. B., 202, 216 f., 225 £
Laplace, 93, 152, i55. 339 C 344.
347. 349

Lassalle, Ferdinand, 266
Lateau, Louise, 199
Laurent, Marie, 282
Lavoisier, A. L., 75, 89, 1041, 127,
137, 140, 143, 202

Lavoisier, Marie Paulze, 108 £,
119 £, 1341
Leeuenhoek, 190, 1921
Leibnitz, 196, 197, 213, 385
Leo X, 28

Leverrier, Urbain, 276, 394
Levi-Civita, 386
Lewisohn, Ludwig, 330
Liebig, Justus, 115, 141, 283, 375
Lightfoot, Rev. Dr., 351
Linnaeus, 214, 334
Lippershey, Johannes, 189

INDEX

424

Lister, Joseph, i, 30 ■ ' . '

Xobatchevsky, N., 386,. .397
Locke, John, 132
Luther, Martin, 28, 267, 360
Lyell, Chas., 219, 229, 231, 233

/ Mach,' Ernst, 384
Machiavelli, 248, 252
Malpighi, 190, 191 £, 198
Malthas, T. R., 163 f., 180, 182,
183, 185, 187 f., 227, 331
Mann, Thomas, 330
Marat, Jean Paul, 118
Marconi, 158, 396
Marie, Mileva, 377, 378
Marsh, O. C., 237
Marx, Karl, 127, 170, 241 f., 331,

Mather, Cotton, 356
Maximilian, Prince, 127
Maxwell, James Clerk, 156 L, 159,

396

Mayer, Robert, 157, 153, 194, 364
Mendel, Gregor, 59, 153, 8o8f.
Mendeleeff, 276
Millikan, Robert, 97
Milne-Edwards, Henri, 194
Minkowski, Hermann, 377
Mitchell, S. L., 1141
Mocenigo, 36!

Moliere, 167

Mondeville, Henry de, 274
Montesquieu, 248, 252
Moulton, R R., 344, 349
Miiller, Johannes, 197 £

; ‘Munthe, Axel, 279

Nageli, Karl, 205
, Narcissus, 328
Needham, 286 .

Newton, Isaac, 65, 80, 101, 127,
132, 146, , 149 £, 154, 158, 160,
161, 189, 213, 236, 240, 282, 342,
376, 382£, 384'f., 386'f., 392.

39X397
Nietzsche, 359
Norrenberg, Dr., 140
Novara, D. M., 17, 20
Nussbaum, Dr., 291 £

Oedipus, 322

O'Neill, James, 330

Osiander, 31 £, 35

Ostwald, Prof., 90

Owen, Robert, 179, 180, 247, 263

Owen, Robert Dale, 183

Paine, Thomas, 178
Paley, Wm., 169, 219
Pascal, 213

Pasteur, Louis, 24, 120, 127, igg,
274, 275, 280 £, 308, 326, 329, 377
Paulze, Jacques-Alexis, 107 £, 117
Peacock, T. L., 170
Penka, Prof. Carl, 359
Pettenkofer, M. J., 277 £, 284, 375
Philaiaus, 18 £, 20
Philo, 11

Pictet, Prof., 123, 125
Pitt, Wm., 169

Place, Francis, 177 £, 185, 188
Planck, ' Max, 97,, 1^58 £,: 379, 400 '£, ■
402

Plato, 19, 48, 98, 171, 185, 380
Playfair, John, 69 £

Pliny, 49
Poggendorf, 139

Poincar 4 Henri, 202, 381 £, 386
Polybius, 250 £

Pouchet, Henri, 286 £

INDEX^

.425

j Priestley, Joseph; 109, 1 13 f.,. §02
i Prometheus, 99 '

I Proudhon, P. J., 248,, 256 1 , 258 f.,-
j ,266,267,268
I Proust, Joseph, 86, f.

i Proust, Marcel, 330

Ptolemy, 1 1 £, 20, 39, 45
; Pythagoras, 17 £ '

h ■ ■;

! Rae,burn, 71

Redi, Francesco, 213, 286 .

Reiser, Anton, 376
; Renan,, Ernest, 76

; Rheticus, 30 £

: Rhodes, Cecil, 356

Ricardo, D,, 248
i Riemann, 386, 397

* Roche, 346

Rontgen, 95

^ Rousseau, J. J., 8, 163, 164, 179,

248, 361

; Roux, Pierre, 297, 298, 301

; Rossetti, Dante G., 377

I Ruge, Arnold, 248, 253 f., 258, 266

I Rumford, Count, 121 £-, 138, 139,

; 15=1

}

{ Saccheri, G., 386

I Saint-Simon, 247

Salisbury, Rollin, 348
Schillings, Anna, 29
Schleiden, M. J., 201 f., 203 £
Schnitzler, Arthur, 330
Schroedinger, Erwin, 97, 159
, Schwann, Theodor, 197 £, 206, 284,
j 352

I Sergi, Giuseppe, 362 £.

Shelley, Percy B., 165
Sizzi, 41

Smith, Adam, 69, 17a

Smithson, James, 133
Socrates, 353
Soddy, Pro£. F., 161
Spallanzani, 286 f.

Spencer, Herbert, 174
Spinoza, 82, 145, 213
Stahl, G. E., 100 £, 1 10 £., 115
Strabo, n £, 49
Sydenham, Dr. T., 275 £. 278

Taine, 380
Thales, 211, 380

Thoinpson, Sarah, 127, 128 £, 135 £
Thomson, J. J., 95, 97
Thomson, Thomas, 90 £
Thucydides, 250 £

Turgot, 108, 252

Tyndall, John, 132, 142 £, 194, 288

Valdry, Paul, 72
Vesalius, 121, 290, 329
Vico, 252

Virchow, Rudolph, 329, 353
Vogt, Karl, 266

Voltaire, 170, 179, 247, 252, 282,
286

Von Buch, Ludwig, 56 £

Von Mohl, Hugo, 206
Von Westphalen, Jenny, 246 £,
264 £,282

Wagner, Richard, 357, 358, 375
Wakefield, Gilbert, 164
Walker, Rev. T., 126
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 113, 174,
185, 492. 230 £, 254, 326
Wallas, Graham, 384
Watzelrode, Lucas, isf., 17
Wedgwood, Emma, 224, 282
Wentworth, Governor, X 25

INDEX

426

Werner, A. G., 53 1 / 63, 67 ■
Whiston, Wm., 51
Wilberforce, Bishop, 233.1
Wolff, ' Kaspar . F., 194 1 , 207
■ Wordsworth, Wm., . 165

Woltm.anii, Ludwig, 361, 363 ,.
Wren, Sir Christopher, 191 ,

Young, Dr. Thomas, 113, 151 1 ,

154^ ^59 ■

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